Comment by mejutoco
Have an optional parameter to opt in to the old behaviour and keep the new correct behaviour the default (without the parameter) seems like a decent choice.
Have an optional parameter to opt in to the old behaviour and keep the new correct behaviour the default (without the parameter) seems like a decent choice.
The control interface burned into your hardware device will not have been rewritten. And it's not like you can have a flag day where everyone switches over, so the lifespan of those hardware devices isn't that relevant.
Backwards compatibility is a large part of the point of the Web.
You could version everything at whatever granularity you like, but over time that accumulates ("bug 3718938: JS gen24 code incorrectly handles Date math as if it were gen25-34", not to mention libraries that handle some versions but not others and then implicitly pass their expectations around via the objects they create so your dependency resolver has to look at the cross product of versions from all your depencies...)
To preserve backwards compatibility and not require all those old sites to update, the legacy behavior would have to be the default, with opt-in for the new behavior.