[tei-council] "soft deprecation": use @status='deprecated' ?

[Lou Burnard]

I tend to agree that this discussion so far seems to be needlessly 
complicating the issue. So I will complicate it some more.

A quick grep through the guidelines shows us "deprecating" several 
different kinds of thing. Most of the time it's a specific attribute or 
(less often) an element, which we retain for purposes of backwards 
compatibility but for which we now recognise a better solution. Flagging 
those up with @status=deprecated and in due course removing them is not 
difficult. But we also tend to talk about "deprecated" usages -- for 
example, that a dictionary entry with only one sense need not tag that 
sense explicitly; or that <ref> should not be used within <biblScope>; 
or that <list> should not used within <keywords>. Such things could (and 
surely should) be caught by additional schematron constraints: but there 
are cases for which I don't think any automated method will be feasible: 
for example the recommendation against using @target (rather than @facs) 
on <locus> to point to an image, or against using <c> rather than <pc> 
to mark punctuation marks.

Should we  ignore such cases entirely in the present discussion?

FWIW, I think a "backwards compatibility" module would be 
over-engineering. If people want to recover something we've removed, 
there are other and simpler ways of doing so.


Most oOn 13/01/13 18:40, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> I'm pretty much with you and Martin - there's deprecation, and thats it. no hard and soft complications
> and worries.
>
> I'm all for formalizing things like this. ie if we decide something is deprecated, set a time limit on it
> (12 months? 2 years?) after which it moves to a module called "backwardcompatibility" which
> is not included by default. We could implement that for the release next autumn. the new
> ability to say @mode on source provides a convenient mechanism,possibly (I havent thought
> through the details).
> --
> Sebastian Rahtz
> http://www.justgiving.com/SebastianRahtz
> Director (Research Support) of Academic IT Services
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>