Create new endpoint URIs for new semantics.
Use vocabulary-based (property-based) entities and never change word (property) semantics.
Contrary to its unpopularity (or because of?), this “strategy”* is far far simpler to maintain and evolve than is “versioning”.
*I say “strategy” because this is more commonsense: it’s how we do things in the real world anyway.
If the semantics don’t change, why do you need a new URI.
Keep in mind you don’t have to focus on the suffix or the last part of the path name when you are naming things by URI.
Also, why is it versioning? You have two endpoints in use. One happened to exist before the other one. That’s an incidental property. And there are scenarios where you may deprecate the latter before the former.
Thinking in “versions” is not an accurate/ergonomic mapping of the domain anyway; we’ve just been tricked into thinking that way because... anthropology something.
Because the API may serve the same purpose as the original, with some modified semantics.
> Also, why is it versioning?
Because the API may serve the same purpose as the original, with some modified semantics.
Sharing a common name with versioning helps identify the relationships between the versions. It also avoids polluting the API namespace with a set of different names for different versions of essentially the same operations.
> Thinking in “versions” is not an accurate/ergonomic mapping of the domain anyway; we’ve just been tricked into thinking that way because... anthropology something.
It feels to me like you're trying to hard to be contrarian, or perhaps you're dealing with some special case scenario where your strategy makes sense.
You'd need to explain the argument in significantly more detail to have a chance of making it convincing.
I’m not being contrarian, but I am expressing frustration with a common yet unnecessarily complicated approach to a general problem. But I stand by my statements, they’ve paid off tremendously in real world contexts.
I 100% think this is the way to go for internal APIs.
For public APIs I may change my opinion here for more sociological/political reasons. The rational/technical reasons all still remain.