Pretty much every major protocol and API has tried to do this. MIME has its fixed header field. XMPP has 'version="1.0"' dutifully exchanged between every peer, every time. HTTP was standardized at 1.1 only to distinguish it from the (rather borked) 1.0. Even IMAP went through a series of versioned revisions (though later versions are themselves actually capabilities), and Mark was one of the first to identify this as a problem.
If you're only seeing this in hindsight, you're in really good company.
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"These are very useful and effective for software library versioning, and there's a temptation to assume that this model works well for protocols too.
It does not."
I believe this is something you only realize when you've gone through and suffered from it. Guilty.
Pretty much every major protocol and API has tried to do this. MIME has its fixed header field. XMPP has 'version="1.0"' dutifully exchanged between every peer, every time. HTTP was standardized at 1.1 only to distinguish it from the (rather borked) 1.0. Even IMAP went through a series of versioned revisions (though later versions are themselves actually capabilities), and Mark was one of the first to identify this as a problem.
If you're only seeing this in hindsight, you're in really good company.