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

[Lou Burnard]

On 13/01/13 21:28, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> on reflection, maybe I mean that when we decide to deprecate something,
> we move it immediately to the new Deprecated module. One day, we delete
> it even from there, but for a few years you can still use it if you want, with
> some extra barrier (making a new schema with that module)
>
>

This is a cunning way of circumventing/subverting the Birnbaum Doctrine. 
Whereas we used to say "no changes made in the TEI scheme will 
invalidate your document", we're now saying "no changes made in the TEI 
scheme will invalidate your document, so long as you include the 
"deprecated" module in your schema".
Will it work though? Suppose we decide that we want to rename attribute 
@target to @url  and deprecate @target passim (stranger things have 
happened). We make the change in P5. We provide alternative definitions 
for all the elements which used to use @target in which they still do 
and bung them in the deprecated module. So far so good. But now suppose 
we make some other change to one or more of those elements, which 
doesn't involve any deprecation  but which is a straightforward bug fix. 
Do we apply this fix to the deprecated version as well? What if  (as you 
suggested earlier) one or more of these elements gets a new attribute ?

And I still don't know what we do about "stylistic deprecation" -- where 
we say this element is permitted in the content model, but you should 
really  only use it in this particular way (e.g. @target on <locus> )