Best way of filtering "what's new" data based on the version

Question

I'm creating a What's New page for a program that will show the user what's new only for the updates not already installed.

For this I'm passing the program build date and version to an asp page that in turn will display the what's new text.

My initial idea was to use a xml file and filter the results based on the version I get from the client but I would like to run by you guys this question to see if there's any more "elegant" solution available.

Using a database is probably overkill and more difficult to update when a new version is released.

Here's an example xml that shows how I might store the data.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  <whatsnew>
    <item version="6.0.0.100" date="19/02/2010">
      <subitem>
        First public beta version.
        Blah blah blah....
      </subitem>
    </item>
    <item version="6.0.0.200" date="21/02/2010">
      <subitem>
        Second public beta version.
        Blah blah blah....
      </subitem>
    </item>
  </whatsnew>

What do you guys think would be the best way to store/display this what's new data, am I on the right track using xml?

Answer 1

Your solution should work fine and is easy to understand and maintain. XML parsing/querying libraries are ubiquitous. I see no reason to over-complicate this with a database or a custom file format.