Re: [hybi] Versioning is a anti-pattern

[John Tamplin <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 2:47 AM, James Graham <[e-mail]> wrote:

> So, to makw sure I understand you correctly, you are proposing that future
> clients and servers support *all* the versions of the draft that have ever
> seen non-trivial deployment (possibly including hixie-75, likely including
> hixie-76, and presumably including more future versions that happen to line
> up with significant client releases)?
>

Speaking for myself, I think we are already likely in a position of
supporting v76 for some extended period of time.  Chrome tends to get
updated pretty quickly, though certain platforms may lag getting a new
release into stable.  Unless the final spec makes FF4.0 (and I don't know
how much lead time it would take to get it in), then it is likely to exist
there for some non-trivial period of time.  I suspect at least one more
intermediate version will see some deployment so we can get real-world data.

The point is, these clients will still exist whether there is a version in
new drafts or not.  Even the question of whether you care about making them
work is orthogonal to the question of whether to put a version on them or
not.  The only thing having a version does for you is to know which version
of the protocol the other end is speaking, rather than having to guess from
the information it sent.  Unless you just send something and hope it works,
you still ultimately decide "the remote endpoint is speaking v76" in either
case -- what you do with it after that is up to you -- it could be that you
drop the connection as incompatible, or it could be you speak v76 to it.

-- 
John A. Tamplin
Software Engineer (GWT), Google