I agree with you, at least from a theoretical or common sense point of view. That being said, I don't think anyone is aware of the logical basis of them practically delivering an inconsistent version format recently. I'm not even sure it has to do with logic, because if that's so, then why we seem to be stable for now with V2 (which can be considered "deprecated" compared to V3, as you pointed out)?jsmorley wrote: ↑June 2nd, 2020, 12:17 pm We will see. It makes no sense at all to me for them to "actively" maintain more than one version of the JSON at a time. Certainly as the format presumably evolves over time, there can be "transition" periods, much like the fact that while some percentage of the world is currently getting the new Windows 10 version 2004 delivered to them, not everyone is, yet. As you say, this transition may be painless and of no consequence to them, as they are not "parsing" anything, while it is of some annoyance to us if there is not some definable, consistent rule for how the change is rolled out to their servers. However, I resist that the long-term outlook is that they are going to randomly output the latest version or one of some "deprecated" versions without some logical basis.
Bottom line, I'm not going to bother deciphering the reasoning (if any) behind these issues recently, as it's a dead end, in my view. It's enough for me that this kind of things are possible to happen without notice - which is why I said what I said. Like mentioned before in another thread, I believe that asking someone (you, in this case) to build a regex for one's own skins is lacking a bit of common sense, and I would never do that. You already do much for the community and if one calls himself a skin developer, he'll build the regex on his own and not ask for someone else to do it just because he's not in the mood to waste time on this.
In other words, what I wrote was just a (hopefully, helpful, if necessary) idea on how to handle these issues in the future. I didn't imply you'd have to do it, or that you'd have to do it now. Just another option, besides the already existing ones.
True, but if I'm not mistaken, setting the UserAgent to a mobile one does seem to "force" a specific version (i.e. V3) over the other (i.e. V2), right? At least this is what has been reported by others, as far as I know.jsmorley wrote: ↑June 2nd, 2020, 12:17 pmI don't see this as an issue of "desktop" vs. "mobile", as that makes no sense at all to me. The entire point of JSON is to separate and segregate the "front-end" from the "back-end", so you can have one data set that can seamlessly be handled by any user interface. There is literally no other purpose for JSON or XML. There is no evidence of that in any case right now, as setting the UserAgent very specifically to a desktop browser did / does not solve the problem.