Forward compatibility

[WA5ZNU]

XDIF should be designed to be forward-compatible and extensible.
It should be possible to add new propagation modes and new contesting info, new emission modes, and new rig information, for example. Adding these should not break any existing XDIF programs (they should either ignore the data if they are import/export conformant, or store it and simply indicate the presence of extra data if interchange conformant.)

Here is are design articles about extensibility for XML:

http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2004/10/27/extend.html
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2004/07/21/design.html
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/12/03/versioning.html
http://www.pacificspirit.com/Authoring/ ... ution.html