Lessons of Event Data Format Design
Read https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/08/30/Event-Structure and follow the link to the "SEF theorem" https://github.com/inlined/versioningishard/ if you're into data format design. Everything about this blog post applies equally well to the spatial data domain. If you've ever encountered GeoJSON features with styling directives mixed in with other feature attributes, you've witnessed the problem of trying to make unstructured GeoJSON data consistent with structured data (Shapefiles or whatever).