This document provides motivation for versioning, a number of questions that language designers must answer, and a variety of version identification strategies. Separate documents contain the terminology definitions and XML language specific discussion.
This document has been developed for discussion by the W3C Technical Architecture Group. It does not yet represent the consensus opinion of the TAG.
Publication of this finding does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time.
Additional TAG findings, both approved and in draft state, may also be available. The TAG expects to incorporate this and other findings into a Web Architecture Document that will be published according to the process of the W3C Recommendation Track.
1.1 Why Do Languages Change?
1.2 How Do Languages Change?
1.2.1 Why Extend languages?
1.3 Kinds of Languages
2 Versioning Strategies
2.1 Why Have a Strategy?
2.2 Versioning Designs
2.2.1 Big Bang/Incompatible
2.2.2 Forwards Compatible
188.8.131.52 Must Accept Unknowns: 3 variants
184.108.40.206.1 Ignore all or only unknown part
220.127.116.11 Fallback Provided
18.104.22.168 Understanding unknown version identifiers
22.214.171.124 Supporting functionality
2.2.3 Backwards compatible
3 Language Requirements
3.1 What language form
3.2 Can 3rd parties extend the language?
3.3 Can 3rd parties extend the language in a compatible way?
3.4 Can 3rd parties extend the language in an incompatible way?
3.5 Can the designer extend the language in a compatible way?
3.6 Can the designer extend the language in an incompatible way?
3.7 Is the vocabulary a stand-alone language or an extension of another vocabulary?
3.8 What Schema language(s)?
3.9 Should extensions or versions be expressible in the Schema language?
3.10 Requirements Summary
4 Language Design
4.1 Schema language design choices or constraints.
4.2 Substitution Mechanism.
4.3 Component identification
4.4 Identification of incompatible extensions
4.5 Design Summary
5 Identifying Languages
5.1 Version Numbers
5.2 XML Namespaces
6 Case Studies
7 Extension versus Versioning
A Change Log (Non-Normative)
The evolution of languages by adding, deleting, or changing syntax or information is called versioning. Making versioning work in practice is one of the most difficult problems in computing. Arguably, the Web rose dramatically in popularity because evolution and versioning were built into HTML and HTTP. Both systems provide explicit extensibility points and rules for understanding extensions that enable their decentralized extension and versioning.
This finding describes general problems and techniques in evolving systems in compatible and incompatible ways. These techniques are designed to allow compatible changes with or without schema propagation. A number of questions, design patterns and rules are discussed with a focus towards enabling versioning in XML vocabularies, making use of XML Namespaces and XML Schema constructs. This includes not only general rules, but also rules for working with languages that provide an extensible container model, such as SOAP and RDF/OWL.
The terminology definitions used throughout are defined in [Versioning]
There are many reasons why a different version of a language may be needed. A few of them include:
Bugs may need to be fixed. Production use may reveal defects or oversights that need to be fixed. This may involve changes to texts of the language or changes to the information of existing texts.
Changing requirements may motivate changes in the schema design. For example, a middle, prefix, suffix, common may be added to a name structure.
Different flavors of a schema may be desirable. For example, the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation defines strict, transitional, and frameset schemas. All three of those schemas purport to define the same namespace, but they describe very different languages.
And additional schemas may be defined by other specifications, such as the XHTML Basic Recommendation.
Whatever the cause, over time, different versions of the language exist and designing applications to deal with this change in a predictable, useful way requires a versioning strategy.
Whether ten, a hundred, or a million resources have been deployed, if a language is changed in such a way that all those resources will consider texts of the new language invalid, a versioning problem with real costs has been introduced.
One of the most important aspects of a language change is whether texts in the revised language are backwards or forwards compatible with the unrevised language .
Some typical backwards- and forwards-compatible changes:
adding optional components ( in XML, this is generally elements and/or attributes)
adding optional content, for example extending an enumeration
Some typical forwards-compatible changes:
Decreasing the maximum allowed number of occurrences of a component but not to less than the minimum
Decreasing the allowed range of a component
Some typical backwards-compatible changes:
Increasing the maximum allowed number of occurrences of a component
Increasing the allowed range of a component
Some typical incompatible changes:
changing the information conveyed by existing components
adding required components
removing required components
restricting a components content model, such as changing a choice to a sequence in XML
adding new components that changes the semantics of existing components
The primary motivation for allowing texts of a language to be augmented with additional text is to decentralize the task of designing, maintaining, and implementing extensions. It allows producers to augment the texts without going through a centralized authority. It means that changes can occur at the producer or consumer without the language owner approving the changes. Consider the effort that the HTML Working Group put into modularity of HTML. Without some decentralized process for extension, every single variant of HTML would have to be called something else or the HTML Working Group would have to agree to include it in the next revision of HTML.
Ultimately, there are different kinds of languages. The versioning approaches and strategies that are appropriate for one kind of language may not be appropriate for another. Among the various kinds of languages, we find:
Just Names: some languages don't actually have a syntax or grammar; they're just lists of names. Using names to identify words in the WordNet database, for example, or the names of functions and operators in XPath2 are examples of "just name" languages.
Markup: SGML, HTML, and the non-SGML variants of HTML are all markup languages. XML languages are described in Versioning - XML
Non-markup Text: languages designed with a text format. These may be programming languages such as Java or ECMAScript, or data formats like CSS or Comma Separated Values. Typically these are intended for humans to author and or view.
binary: languages that are not in a text format. These may be image formats like GIF, JPEG, or even binary encoded XML.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Nor are these categories exclusive. Many languages have mixed modes. For example, XQuery has a text mode and an XML mode.
Languages may be composed of different languages, including different kinds of languages. If a language is composed of other languages, then languages are considered nested. There may be different versioning strategies for each nested language, and they all combine together into the overall versioning strategy.
In broad terms, the strategies to versioning fall into a number of classes ranging from "none" to a "big bang":
None. No distinction is made between versions of the language. Applications are either expected not to care, or they are expected to cope with any version they encounter.
Compatible. Designers are expected to limit changes to those that are either backwards or forwards compatible, or both.
Backwards compatibility. Applications are expected to behave properly if they receive a text of the "older" version of a language.
Forwards compatibility. Applications are expected to behave properly if they receive a text of the "newer" version of a language.
Big bang. Applications are expected to abort if they see an unexpected version.
There's no single approach that's always correct. Different application domains will choose different approaches. But by the same token, the approaches that are available depend on other choices or constraints. One very important constraint is the whether the language can be evolved by distributed parties such that parallel evolutionary development can occur. The dependencies makes it imperative to plan for versioning from the start. If versioning is not planned from the start, then the possible versioning strategies may be constrained by decisions that have already been made.
A language commonly goes through a lifecycle of iterative development followed by deployment followed by deployment of new versions. The point in the lifecycle of the language may also affect the selection of the versioning strategy for the language
Just as there are a number of strategies, there are a number of designs for implementing a strategy. The internet - including MIME, markup languages, and XML languages have successfully used various strategies, either singly or in combination. Summaries of strategies and requirements have been produced for earlier technologies and guided XML Namespaces and Schema, such as [Web Architecture: Extensible Languages].
Different kinds of languages and different versioning strategies expose different problems. Attempting to deploy a system that provides no versioning mechanism puts the burden of version "discovery" on consumers and is often impractical in anything except a closed system.
At the other end of the spectrum is the "big bang" approach which is also problematic.
"Big bang" is a very coarse-grained approach to versioning. It establishes a single version identifier, either a version number or namespace name, for an entire text.
The semantics of the "big bang" are that applications decide on the basis of the text version whether or not they know how to process that text. If the version isn't recognized, the entire text is rejected. Typically, when introducing a new version using the big bang approach, all of the software that produces or consumes the texts is updated in a sweeping overhaul in which the entire system is brought down, the new software deployed and the system is restarted. This big bang approach to versioning is practical only in circumstances where there is a single controlling authority, and even in that case, it carries with it all manner of problems. The process can take a considerable amount of time, leaving the system out of commission for hours if not days. This can result in significant losses if the system is a key component of a revenue generating business process and the cost of coordinating the system overhaul can also be quite costly as well.
The "big bang" approach is appropriate when the new version is radically different from its predecessor. But in many cases, the changes are incremental and often a consumer could, in practice, cope with the new version. For example, it might be that there are many messages that don't use any features of the new version or perhaps it is appropriate to simply ignore components that are not recognized.
Recall our Name example and consider a producer and a consumer exchanging name messages. Imagine that some future version of the name language defines a new "middle" component. Because producers and consumers are distributed, it may happen that an old consumer, one unprepared for a middle component, encounters a message with a middle component sent by a newer producer.
If big bang versioning is used, old systems will reject the new message. However, if the versioning strategy allowed the old consumer to simply ignore unrecognized content, it's quite possible that other components of the system could simply adapt to the previous behavior. In effect, the old system would ignore the middle component and its descendents so it would "see" a message that looks just like the old message it is expecting.
For the producer, the result would be that the request is fulfilled, though perhaps not quite the way it may have hoped. For example, a request that results in a name response may return a name without the middle. In many cases this may be better behavior than receiving an error. In particular, producers using the new language can be written to cope with the possibility that they will be speaking to older consumers.
If the new system needs to make sure that middle is respected, then it can change the language in an incompatible way to indicate that the new behavior is not considered backwards compatible.
Often, what is needed is some sort of middle ground solution.
For any given strategy, there are various designs that achieve the strategy, and some may be more appropriate than others. Among them we find:
As desirable as compatible evolution often is, sometimes a language may not want to allow it. In this model, a consumer will generate a fault if it finds a component it doesn’t understand. An example might be a security specification where a consumer must understand each and every extension. This suffers from the significant drawback that it does not allow compatible changes to occur in the language, as any changes require both consumer and producer to change. A few different designs for incompatible evolution are:
Must Understand All: consumers must understand all of the text received and are expected to abort processing if they do not.
Must Understand Listed: consumers must understand the text portions that are listed in some well-defined place in the text.
Must Understand Marked: consumers must understand the text portions that are marked as being mandatory. SOAP Header Blocks with the mustUnderstand attribute is an example.
Forwards compatible evolution of a language means that producers of texts in language should be able to produce texts in a revision of the language without consumers having to change existing implementations that know of only the original language. The most common characteristic of a compatible change is the addition of syntax and/or features in a language, usually using the original language's extensibility mechanisms. However, languages may change in a forwards compatible way through the removal of features or syntax. This finding deals with the common case, in which features and/or syntax are added not removed, and in which the goal is to maximize compatibility when making such changes.
A supreme example of the benefits of extensibility is HTML. The first version of HTML was designed for extensibility; it specified that "unknown markup" may be encountered. An example of this is the addition of the IMG tag. This is a great example of a language designed for extensibility.
The first rule introduced in this Finding relating to extensibility is:
Be Extensible rule: Languages should be Extensible.
A language that allows additional syntax also requires a specification of what happens when the additional syntax is in a text. By the definition of Extensibility, there is a mapping from all texts with additional syntax to texts without. If the extensibility is used in a forwards-compatible way, then by definition the software consuming the extension does not know about the extension and we call such extension an unknown extension. If the software consuming the extension "knows" about the extension, then it has been revised and uses the revised language that incorporates the extension. The behavior of software when it encounters an unknown extension, that is the mapping from texts with additional syntax to texts without, should be clear.
The simplest model that enables forwards-compatible changes is to require that a language consumer must accept content that is unknown. This rule is:
Must Accept Unknowns Rule: Consumers MUST accept any text portion that they do not recognize.
This is sometimes called the "MUST Ignore Unknowns" rule. HTML 4.01 follows this approach "If a user agent encounters an element it does not recognize, it should try to render the element's content. ". Under HTML 4.01, a user agent is free to remove or preserve an element that is not recognized. The Must Accept Unknowns rule for XML was first standardized in the WebDAV specification RFC 2518  section 14 and later separately published as the Flexible XML Processing Profile .
An extension that affects an existing component is an incompatible change because it changes the mapping of the text with the extension to one without such that a consumer that is unaware of the extension will produce Information from the text that is incompatible with the intended Information (more work...). An additional rule is required:
Preserve existing information Rule: An Extensible Language MUST require that any texts with extensions MUST be compatible with a text without the extensions.
There are two specific variants of the Must Accept rule that qualify what kind of handling beyond accepting is required. One model is to remove the unknown:
Must Accept and Remove Unknowns Rule (Must Accept variant 1): Consumers MUST accept and remove any text portion that they do not recognize.
There is a history of usage of the Must Accept and Remove Unknowns rule. HTML 1, 2 and 3.2 follow the Must Accept and Remove Unknowns Rule as they specify that any unknown start tags or end tags are mapped to nothing during tokenization.
Another model is to preserve the unknown. This rule is:
Must Accept and Preserve Unknowns Rule (Must Accept variant 2): Consumers MUST accept and preserve any text portion that they do not recognize.
HTTP 1.1  specifies that a transparent proxy should accept and preserve any headers it doesn't understand: "Unrecognized header fields SHOULD be ignored by the recipient and MUST be forwarded by transparent proxies."
Ignoring content is a simple solution to the problem of substitution. In order to achieve a compatible evolution, the newer texts of a language must be transformable (or substitutable) into older texts. Object systems typically call this "polymorphism", where a new type can behave as the old type.
In tree based languages, which includes all markup languages, there are two broad types of Must Ignore rules for dealing with extensions, either ignoring the entire tree or just the unknown part of the tree. The rule for ignoring the entire tree is:
Must Accept All Rule: The Must Accept rule applies to unrecognized texts and their descendents in tree based formats.
This variation on must accept requires the consumer to accept the text and any children it does not understand. Most data applications, such as Web services that use SOAP header blocks or WSDL extensions, adopt this approach to dealing with unexpected markup. For example, if a message is received with unrecognized elements in a SOAP header block, they must be ignored unless marked as "Must Understand" (see Rule 10 below). Note that this rule is not broken if the unrecognized elements are written to a log file. That is, "accepted" or "ignored" doesn’t mean that unrecognized extensions can’t be processed; only that they can’t be the grounds for failure to process.
Other applications may need a different rule as the application may want to retain the content of an unknown component, perhaps for display purposes. The rule for accepting the component only is:
Must accept Container Rule: The Must accept rule applies only to the smallest portion of the tree.
This variation on must accept requires the consumer to accept the smallest part of the text that is ignorable. For markup languages, this could be just an element or attribute that it does not understand, but in the case of elements, to process the children of that element. The Must accept Container practice was described in [HTML 2.0]
This retains the element descendents in the processing model so that they can still affect interpretation of the text, such as for display purposes.
A language can provide mechanisms for explicit fallback if the text is not supported. [MIME] provides multipart/alternative for equivalent, and hence fallback, representations of content. [HTML 4.0] uses this approach in the NOFRAMES element. In XML, the XML Inclusions specification [XInclude] provides a fallback element to handle the case where the putatively included resource cannot be retreived. There are many variations on where the fallback content can be found. For example, a schema language could specify that fallback content is found in a text, in a schema, or even in the schema for the schema language.
Providing forwards compatibility often requires more than a substitution model for texts, it must also provide a substitution model for any version identifiers.
Provide Version Identification substitution model: Languages MUST provide a substitution model for version identifiers for forwards-compatible evolution.
The use of a version identifier requires a substitution from an unknown version to a known version for a consumer that doesn't understand the version identifier.
There could be an algorithmic approach. For version numbers, one could say that version numbers will only have a "major" change if there is an incompatible change. For example, version 1.1 of a language is by definition compatible with version 1.0 and version 2.0 is incompatible. Then, when the producer puts 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0, a consumer at any level will know whether it can process the content. This also means that there is a choice about which version number to put in, the lowest or the highest. A document that contains "1.1" means that any 1.X processor can process it. A "2.0" document means that a 1.X processor cannot process it, but any "2.X" processor can.
Then the language have wording about processing unknown version numbers. Sample wording for a substitution model for version identifiers: "A processor of this version MUST not fault if it receives a document that contains the same major version number." This rule would be in conjunction with forwards-compatible design for the texts, such as "Must accept Unknowns".
Additional functionality can be provided in a language for determining the capabilities of the system that the text is being interpreted in. A language can provide a mechanism for explicit testing. The XSLT Specification provides a conditional logic element and a function to test for the existence of extension functions. This allows designers of stylesheets to deal with different consumer capabilities in an explicit fashion.
In general, providing backwards compatibility is easier than providing forwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility means supporting the previous versions of text in a newer consumer. There are are two significant ways that backward compatibility can be supported.
In the replacement design, the new version of software replaces the old and the new version of the software supports the old and the new version. That is, producer does not need to distinguish between the old and the newer consumer. For example, a web resource that supports additional Name Information as input does not change the URI of the resource.
In the side-by-side design, the new version of the software and the old version of the software are deployed "side-by-side". One variant of the approach is offering both versions of the system, for example by using different URIs for the old and new resources. The request to one resource gets mapped to the other resource behind the scenes using a proxy or gateway. This "alternative" approach works when the intermediary can completely handle or generate the new information (for backwards compatibility) or accept the new information (for forwards compatibility). For example, adding SSL security to a resource changes the URI but a Web server can typically handle mapping the https: URI to the older http: URI. If both URIs are maintained, then the addition is a compatible change. Another example is where new information is required, such as the priority, and the intermediary can apply a default value to provide the required priority. However, this too has its costs as multiple versions of the software must be supported and maintained over time and there is the added cost of developing the proxy or gateway between the two environments. Further, this does not work in scenarios where the intermediary cannot generate the new required content. For example, if a middle name is required in V2, a middle cannot be generated from just a family and a given name.
Languages can choose a mixture of approaches. For example, XSLT provides both an explicit fallback mechanism for some conditions and explicit testing for others. The SOAP specification, another example, specifies Must accept as the default strategy and the ability to dynamically mark components as being in the Must Understand strategy.
Given the types of versioning strategies and designs that are available, there are some key requirements the language designer consider in choosing a strategy and design.
Languages can be expressed in text, comma separated values, XML, SGML, binary, source code, and almost any kind of form. See the Architecture of the World-Wide Web section on data formats for more information - http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/#formats.
It is sometimes desirable to prevent 3rd parties from extending languages, but it does happen. An example may be a tightly constrained security environment where distributed authoring is considered a "bug" rather than a feature.
If so, a substitution mechanism is required for forwards compatibility. If an older consumer has no mechanism for dealing with new content, then forwards-compatible evolution isn't possible. One simple substitution mechanism is simply ignoring the unrecognized components.
If so, and if compatible extensions are also possible, then it must be possible to identify incompatible changes so that they can override the substitution mechanism used for extensible changes.
In environments where unrecognized components are accepted, a "must understand" component can be added to identify incompatible changes.
If compatible changes are not possible, then incompatible changes simply become the default. For example, WS-Security mandates that 3rd parties can only provide incompatible extensions. Unlike most languages, a security language has unique requirements where the consequences of accepted data can be severe. WS-Security accomplished this by specifying that all extensions are required to be understood and there is no substitution mechanism.
As with 3rd parties compatible extensions, a substitution mechanism for the designer’s extensions is required for forwards compatibility.
In XML, the designer can always do this by using new namespace names, element names or version numbers. In other languages, this may not be possible because there is no mechanism for indicating the incompatible change.
A part of this question is whether the language depends on another language. That determines which, if any, facilities are provided for the containing language and what must be provided by a contained language.
SOAP is an example of a container language. The SOAP processing
model applies uniformly to all headers, which may employ
soap:mustUnderstand to identify incompatible changes,
even though the contents of the SOAP headers are languages independent
Choosing a schema language or languages guides the language design in many ways. Some features, particularly extensibility, must be anticipated in the first version of a language in order to take advantage of the features of some schema languages.
In addition, various features may be incompatible across different languages. For example, writing a V2 compatible schema in W3C XML Schema requires special design, which is not required in a schema language such as RELAX NG. Some of the language design choices mandated by W3C XML Schema are discussed in other sections of this Finding.
The ability to write a schema for extensions or versions is directly affected by the schema design and the compatibility desires.
Upon answering these questions, there are some key decisions that a language developer makes, whether they are consciously made or not.
If the language is intended to be capable of compatible extensibility, then a few specific schema design choices must be followed.
Forwards compatibility can only be achieved by providing a substitution mechanism for Version 2 instances or Version 1 extensions to V1 without knowledge of V2. A V1 consumer must be able to transform any instances, such as V1 + extensions, to a V1 instance in order to process the instance. The "Must Accept and Discard Unknowns" rule is a simple substitution mechanism. This rule says that any extensions are "ignored". Using it, a V1 + extensions text is transformed into a V1 text by discarding the extensions. Others substitution mechanisms exist, such as the fallback model in XSLT.
The identification of components into language versions or extensions has a variety of general mechanisms related to namespaces. These are detailed in the Versioning section.
The identification of versions is covered by language identification, but 3rd parties cannot arbitrarily change versions or change namespaces. They may need a mechanism to indicate that an extension is an incompatible change. A couple of mechanisms are a "Must Understand" identifier (such as a flag or list of required namespaces) or requiring that extensions are in substitution groups.
In many cases, an important aspect of versioning is to be able to determine the specific language of a given texts and sub-texts. This is often done by providing an identifier of the version of text.
Language Identification rule: Any Languages intended for versioning SHOULD have a version identification strategy
Having multiple versions naturally leads to the need to identify versions. Version identification has traditionally been done with a decimal separating the major versions from the minor versions, ie "8.1", "1.0". Often the definition of a "major" change is that it is incompatible, and the definition of a "minor" change is that it is forwards- and/or backwards - compatible. Usually the first broadly available version starts at "1.0". A compatible version change from 1.0 might be identified as "1.1" and an incompatible change as "2.0".
The version numbers can be contained in the texts, in the protocol messages containing in the text, or the address for the protocol messages. Some examples are shown below:
<name version="2.0"> <given>Dave</given> <family>Orchard</family> </name> <span class="fn20">Dave Orchard</span> urn:nameschemev2:given:Dave:family:Orchard <?XML version="1.1"?> GET /name/123456789 HTTP/1.1 GET /name/v2/123456789/ HTTP 1.1
It should be noted that associating version number changes with compatibility changes may be idealistic as there abundant cases where this system does not hold. New major version identifiers are often aligned with product releases, or incompatible changes identified as a "minor" change. A good example of an incompatible changed identified as a minor change is XML 1.1. XML 1.0 processors cannot process all XML 1.1 documents because XML 1.1 extended XML 1.0 where XML 1.0 does not allow such extension.
Unfortunately, version numbers often wind up looking very similar to the big bang approach. In many approaches, each language is given a version identifier, almost always a number, that's incremented each time the language changes. Although it's possible to design a system with version numbers that enables both backward and forward compatibility - for example XSLT - typically a version change is treated as if that the new language is not backwards compatible with the old language.
Some efforts, such as HTTP, try to have the best of both worlds by allowing for extensibility (in HTTP's case, via headers) as well as version numbers that explicitly identify when a new version is backwards compatible with an old version.
One argument in favor of version numbers is that they allow one to determine what is a 'new version' and what is an 'old version'. But in practice this is not necessarily true. For example, RSS has 0.9x, 1.x, and 2.x versions, all being actively developed in parallel. In effect the version numbers, even though they appear to be ordered, are simply opaque identifiers. Using version numbers does not gaurantee that version 1+x has any particular relationship to version 1.
Version numbers typically work best when versioning and extending a language is done in a centralized and linear manner. The makeup of each version can then be consistent and well described.
There are many cases where decentralized and non-linear versioning is desired. The desire for decentralized and non-linear versioning and extensibility was a large motivator for XML and for XML Namespaces. The self-describing and extensible nature of XML markup, and the addition of XML Namespaces, provides a framework for developing languages that can evolve in a decentralized manner. XML Namespaces [ XML Namespaces 1.0] provide a mechanism for associating a URI with an XML element or attribute name, thus specifying the language of the name. This also serves to prevent name collisions.
|Language form||Markup||Markup||Markup + attribute names|
|Schema Lang||DTD with changes||Backus-Naur Form||uFormat specific|
|3rd party compatibly extend||Yes||No||Yes|
|3rd party incompatibly extend||No||No||No|
|Designer incompatibly extend||Yes||Yes||Yes|
|Schema design||Extensible||BNF with no extensibility||Constraints on HTML elems+attribute values|
|Substitution Mechanism||Must Accept Unknowns||None||HTML's|
|Component Identification||DTD + Name||Name or Qualified Name||string in class attribute|
|Incompatible Ext identification||None||None||None|
Languages that are designed for decentralized extensibility, notably but not limited to XML, have the interesting situation where the distinction between an extension and a version can be quite blurred, depending upon the language designer’s choices.
The typical way of thinking of these two concepts is that extension is typically the addition of components over space; that is, designers other than the language’s creator are adding components. Versioning is typically the addition of components over time, under the designer’s explicit control. In either case, a change to the language may be done in a compatible or an incompatible way. The simple cases of extensions are compatible decentralized additions and versions are compatible or incompatible centralized changes are how we typically distinguish the terms. But these break down depending upon how the language is designed.
There are a couple of scenarios that illustrate the ambiguity in these terms. Imagine that version 1.0 of a Name consists of "First" and "Last" elements. A 3rd party author extends the Name with a "middle" element in a new namespace which they control.
In scenario 1, the Name author decides to formally incorporate the middle name as an optional (and hence compatible) addition to the name, producing version 1.1 of the Name type. They do this by referring to the third party’s definition for middle names. This is typically considered a new "version" of the Name and would probably result in a new definition. If the Name author re-uses the existing names for compatible revisions, there will be no difference in a text containing middle that is of Version 1.0 or Version 1.1 type. The texts are the same, and thus the distinction between a "version" and an "extension" is meaningless for an individual text.
In scenario 2, the middle author decides that the middle name is a mandatory part of the Name type. They were provided a mechanism for indicating an incompatible change and they use it. Now an instance of Name with the middle is incompatible with version 1.0 of the Name. What "version" of the Name is this middle, and is the middle an "extension" or a "version"? It isn’t 1.0. It’s probably more accurately thought of as a version defined by the 3rd party. Again, the presence of the "extension" is actually an incompatible change.
These two examples—a 3rd party extension being added into a compatible version and a 3rd party extension resulting in an incompatible version—show the ability to specify (in)compatibility has blurred the distinction between these two terms.
This Finding is intended to motivate language designers to plan for versioning and extensibility in the languages from the very first version. It details the downsides of ignoring versioning. To help the language designer provide versioning in their language, the finding describes a number of questions, decisions and rules for using in language construction and extension. The main goal of the set of rules is to allow language designers to know their options for language design, and make backwards- and forwards-compatible changes to their languages to achieve loose coupling between systems should that desirable.
The author thanks Norm Walsh for many contributions as co-editor until 2005. Also thanks the many reviewers that have contributed to the document particularly David Bau, William Cox, Ed Dumbill, Chris Ferris, Yaron Goland, Rhys Lewis, Hal Lockhart, Mark Nottingham, Jeffrey Schlimmer, Cliff Schmidt, and Norman Walsh.
|DBO||20070518||Incorporated Rhys' comments, added version identifier story to forwards compatible evolution, split part 1 into terminology and strategies documents.|
|DBO||20070518||Incorporated WG comments from May f2f which involved many updates to 126.96.36.199, made 1 table for case studies.|