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

[Martin Holmes]

>
> 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> )

I don't really think this is much of a problem in real life, as long as 
the Guidelines are chock-full of good examples of what we believe people 
should be doing. (Of course they're still a bit lacking in that area, 
but we are committed to fixing that.) Weird uses which are 
schema-compliant but undesirable tend to arise mainly because there's no 
useful example for people to follow. The elementSpec for <locus> is good 
in this respect: there are two examples and a note explaining the issue.

If we give advice and people choose to ignore it, that's up to them, 
really. We can't police everything.

Cheers,
Martin


On 13-01-13 01:44 PM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> 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> )
>
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)