[uf-discuss] Microformat versioning

Thu Dec 14 14:51:23 PST 2006

I think it has been a common practice to use URIs or URLs as
versioning mechanisms but I'm not it's the best practice. Let me give
you an example: FOAF. FOAF a namespace but they are often adding new
properties that people agree to be useful just like microformats. The
URL is an identifier of a concept, but shouldn't be thought of it as a
version or that its contents will never change.

In general I think that versioning is such a complicated beast and
that it's hard to solve. Mark Baker recently talked about the issue:

http://www.coactus.com/blog/2006/12/validation-considered-harmful/

However, I think that having disambiguation of properties or concepts
is a good start but need not to be confused with versioning.

-Elias

On 12/13/06, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a useful reply and seems relevant to authors/implementors and
> to parsers (though parsing doesn't belong on this list).
>
> If it's not been done already, could this be added to the wiki under
> versioning practices?
>
> Chris
>
> On 12/13/06, Ciaran McNulty <mail at ciaranmcnulty.com> wrote:
> > On 12/13/06, Steve Marshall <steve at nascentguruism.com> wrote:
> > > This, to my mind, is sub-optimal: the version of the format in use
> > > isn't something most (if any) users care about and, ideally, shouldn't
> > > be required to be part of the content.
> >
> > For Microformats that have an XMDP profile this is at least in part
> > solved, a page using hCard would, for instance, have the following:
> >
> > <html profile="http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard">
> >
> > Which clearly references a time-based version of the hCard profile.
> > Presumably if hCard is updated, then new profile URLs will be
> > established.
> >
> > However because hListing is still a draft, there isn't a profile to
> > link to, so I don't know if there's a solution for you.  The status of
> > the draft format is so much in flux, it might not be practical to
> > start 'version numbering' them just yet anyhow.
> >
> > -Ciaran
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> >
>
>
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