Subject: Re: [Geojson] [draft-geojson] (No) Version (#95)

From: Dirk-Willem van Gulik <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 08:06:09 +0100

On 12 Jan 2016, at 02:47, Erik Wilde <[email-masked]> wrote:

> i have to admit that i dislike the 'X-' part. for reference, there's a whole RFC on discouraging that pattern: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648
> the key question is: what's the difference between a 'X-' thing that can be "safely ignored", and something else i don't know about? can't i "safely ignore" such a non-'X-' thing? my preferred extension model would be to say that any extension can be ignored, and MUST be designed to be ignorable. applications MUST NOT add data that breaks GeoJSON when it is ignored.

I totally see the point of RFC 6648 its crusade against ‘X-‘. And would fully support going down that route.

However RFC 6648 is not ‘free’ — section 4 says in effect that one ‘SHOULD establish registries…’ etc (or in our case - in effect rely even more on the various OGC well known identifiers).

In any case - stating up front that ‘Version’ is the field used once there are multiple versions* and that this is version ‘1.00’ and that one can assume a value of ‘version’ set to the string ‘1’ or something - is useful. Or alternatively state that such field shoud not occur in implementations of this version of the spec.

Dw

*: and leaving the meaning of <major>.<minor> with respect to backward compatibility open.