Codestamp: The roadmap to creating graceful deprecation of informative articles.

Being a programmer for a little while now, I've noticed that there is a fairly prevalent problem in the realm of code-blogs and documentation. The problem is that sometimes the code referenced in an article, on a website, or sometimes in documentation (especially for smaller projects) lacks information regarding whether or not the information is current. This is why I propose the "codestamp", like a timestamp, except for a software project stack.

How would a codestamp work? The idea behind codestamp is to add an HTML snippet to any code-related information that explains the following

• A list of relevant software and hardware (languages, frameworks, browsers, devices, and version numbers)
• The date the article was written
• A link to the official project if applicable

The three pieces of information could save developers like myself hours of fruitless labor caused by reading deprecated information. Additionally, there is room for future development of this idea by creating a centralized database of code repositories and compatibility, and then codestamps could interact with an API to pull the relevant information. For example, a codestamp could list a framework, versions, and maybe even methods for a certain framework, and then the codestamp could use the API to determine the level of compatibility and deprecation.

I know at this point in the article your probably dying to see what my quasi-utopian concept of a codestamp would look like. So here it is, codestamp v1, technology used in this article:

date: Jan 5th, 2014
user_agents: [
    "Google Chrome",
    "MacBook Air",
    "OS X Lion"
]

frameworks: [
    "Ruby 2.0.0",
    "Octopress 2.0",
    "Twitter Bootstrap 2.3.2"
]

Ideally this would be in some kind of drop down menu, but I'm writing this article using .markdown format, so my ability to customize is limited.

The point that I'm trying to drive home with this article is that because technology changes so quickly, it is important to be responsible when writing about code, especially high level frameworks that change on a day-to-day basis. Codestamping starts with us, the developers. If we can come up with an equitable system of tracking tech articles, this could even become part of the W3C spec, and actually make a difference in disseminating code-based knowledge.