[tei-council] copy of messaged added to SF ticket 1933481 - deprecation attribute

[Sebastian Rahtz]

as requested by TEI Council, James Cummings and I met to discuss this. We concluded that a documentary attriibute on *Spec will not be hard to maintain, and will allow the TEIC or 3rd parties to build services in the future (eg showing deprecated elements in red on a web page).

To get better value from @status, we propose three allowed values
   - deprecated:  this object will disappear one day
   - unstable: this object is new, and may change rapidly
   - changed: this object has changed in some way since the last release
the implicit default of course is "stable"

This will allow tools to support "dont include deprecated or unstable objects", and allow for list of changed objects to be created.

We believe that the status attribute should be accompanied by adding *Spec to att.datable, to allow finer-grained control. so

   @from indicates when the status changed to deprecated or unstable
   @to indicates when an object is scheduled to die or become stable
   @when (or @period, which may refer to releases) indicates when the object as a whole changed

@notAfter and @notBefore mean something vaguer :-}

these are all optional!

All this does NOT mandate the TEIC to use all or any of these features now, but allows for gradual imprrovement in working practices. Particularly the use of status='changed' needs some technical work to automate it.
--
Sebastian Rahtz      
 Information and Support Group Manager
Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el futuro no me sea indiferente