How to cite this paper

Lapeyre, Deborah Aleyne. “A non-backwards-compatible update: a difficult decision.” Presented at International Symposium on Versioning XML Vocabularies and Systems, Montréal, Canada, August 11, 2008. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Versioning XML Vocabularies and Systems. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 2 (2008). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol2.Lapeyre01.

International Symposium on Versioning XML Vocabularies and Systems
August 11, 2008

Balisage Paper: A non-backwards-compatible update: a difficult decision

Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre

Mulberry Technologies, Inc.

Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre is a Senior XML and XSLT Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML and XSLT solutions. She teaches XML literacy; business implications of XML, and hands-on XML (and SGML) syntax, DTD and schema construction; XSLT, and XSL-FO courses. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984, which was before SGML was officially adopted as an ISO standard. In a previous life, she write wrote code for systems that put ink on paper and used, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named "SAMANTHA".

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.

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