Dare Obasanjo discusses what considerations you should make when versioning XML formats, as well as covering some approaches to designing extensible XML formats in a manner compatible with existing XML technologies. (23 printed pages)
An XML vocabulary should be designed in such a way that the applications that process it do not break when it is inevitably changed. One of the primary benefits of using XML for building data interchange formats is that the APIs and technologies for processing XML are quite resilient additions to vocabularies. If I write an application that loads RSS feeds looking for item elements, then processes their link and title elements using any one of the various technologies and APIs for processing, such as SAX, the DOM or XSLT, it is straightforward to build the application so that it is unaffected by changes in the RSS specification or extensions as long as the link and title elements always appear in a feed.
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