SCS2: Stelios' last two items

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi Stelios,

On Wed, Oct 07, 2026 at 07:30:35AM -0700, Stelios Voutsinas wrote:
> I think this all sounds reasonable, though I am still wondering if "/scs2"
> is the right fixed name to land on. Essentially we are including the major
> version in the path, which I feel goes against the argument that only one
> version should be around at any time. If we later introduce a SCS version 3
> does the path become "/scs3"? So I'm wondering if a plain "/scs" would
> work? Clients can still guess the protocol from the access URL but we are
> then not tying the protocol version to the URL.

My outlook has been for a long time that different major versions are
essentially independent standards, which includes separate
repositiories for the text, different standards records (which in
particular implies that the standard ids have different base URIs
as in ivo://ivoa.net/scs2#query-2.0 rather than
ivo://ivoa.net/scs#query-2.0), different rows in the document
repository, etc.

This makes several things a bit simpler; as a weak indicator why this
is the saner design, think of the VOResource metadata of different
major versions: from authors to description, it is likely that
different major versions will differ greatly.

I'll admit that we *could* design this differently without *too* much
trouble.  But with this design, different major versions need
different short names.  The least confusing thing to form these
different short names is IMHO to just include a numeric major
version, and hence in this case we'll get scs2.  To a computer,
that's conceptually opaque, though.  It's just the name of the
standard, and if we were as easy-going as the designers of UEFI, we
chould as well use aa1305b9-01f3-4afb-920e-c9b979a852fd.

Once you buy all that, using "scs" instead of "scs2" would be about
as odd as using "siap": scs2 is just the short name of the standard.
And yes, if we ever did a major version 3, we'd probably use scs3 as
its short name and use that string whereever we want to identify
something belonging to the standard.

But then, who knows, there could be a new renaissance and people
would find a liking for roman numerals.  Me, I'd certainly not veto
scs-iii (I would veto scs-III, though, because mixed-case is evil
when you have case insensitivity, which we regrettably have in
ivoids).

Thanks,

            Markus