Re: [hybi] Versioning is a anti-pattern

[Adam Barth <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Daniel Stenberg <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Sep 2010, Adam Barth wrote:
>> Please don't add versioning to the protocol.  Versioning is a anti-pattern
>> for the web.
>
> We've seen this mentioned before on this list but without a lot of
> clarifications and I'm curious:
>
> What are the other transfer protocols for which versioning have failed so
> significantly that versioning in protocols can be called an anti-pattern?

Versioning has been a big pain point for TLS.  Here's a presentation
that outlines some recent implementation experience:

http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/65/slides/tls-6.pdf

I encourage you to read through the presentation (it's pretty short).

> Or isn't it so that it truly is an anti-pattern for the *web* (with the
> emphasis added on the web word) and we're not really doing web here, we're
> discussing a transfer protocol.

It's a continual annoyance in dealing with the IETF to have to deal
with this "browsers don't matter" attitude.  In he case of this
working group, we're working on a protocol expressly for use by
browsers, which would seem to indicate that browser implementation
experience is relevant.

> HTTP is the primary "web protocol" and AFAIK, its versioning is usually not
> considered a failure.

The version number in HTTP hasn't been change in a very long time.  I
suspect we'd encounter tremendous difficulty if we tried to change it
today.

Adam