A non-backwards-compatible update: a difficult decision
Copyright © 2008 Mulberry Technologies, Inc.
Abstract
The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Journal/Book Tag Sets have been widely adopted by libraries, archives, and commercial publishers. The users are widely distributed, generally unknown to each other, and in many cases unknown to the Tag Set advisory group, owners, and secretariat. The first five revisions to the Tag Sets were backwards compatible, but the most recent is not. The decision to make a non-backwards-compatible revision was not taken lightly. It was made based on several factors, including a decision to favor the needs of future users over the convenience of current users.