<p><a class="user-mention" data-hovercard-type="user" data-hovercard-url="/hovercards?user_id=360803" data-octo-click="hovercard-link-click" data-octo-dimensions="link_type:self" href="https://github.com/gravitystorm">@gravitystorm</a> you are essentially making an argument for versioning the representation too. Up to now the abstract underlying data representation has essentially been documented (if you so want) by the XML representation and has been in lock step with that.</p>
<p>Now clearly we could change the representation in isolation, as your example  suggests, without changing the API nor the underlying abstract data model and this would clearly require changing the API version too, because without that you would not know that you are getting a non-backwards compatible XML doc. But the ITU lies in the direction of doing and supporting that kind of change, so I hope we are not venturing there.</p>
<p>But the other way around does not imply the same thing, for example all the changes that have been made to the API to date work just fine with 0.6 XML documents.  And for example it would be -very- surprising if implementing <a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load issue title" data-id="479747839" data-permission-text="Issue title is private" data-url="https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/2348" data-hovercard-type="issue" data-hovercard-url="/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/2348/hovercard" href="https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/2348">#2348</a> and jacking up the API version would suddenly result in output that is not parseable by tools (at least those that do proper validation of their input) that would in principle work just fine if the gratious change to the "representation version" hadn't been made.</p>

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