[tei-council] respond by 1 May: summary of and path forward for "no longer recommended" and "deprecated" practices

[James Cummings]

On 21/04/13 10:53, Gabriel Bodard wrote:
> On 19/04/2013 17:54, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>> I meant the third of these.  I have elaborated the sentence in the
>> document.  As I understood our discussion, the decision to make
>> something "no longer recommended" does not entail that it will
>> definitely be removed in P6; therefore, we do not need to add this to
>> the P6-dev page.
>
> But they might, mightn't they? So perhaps we should say "should not
> automatically be added to the p6-dev wiki page, but may if we feel that
> it is a candidate for more proactive discussion at a post-P5 level" or
> similar?

I'd agree with this -- appearance on this wiki page is just a 
mechanism for reminder for Council to reconsider these at a time 
of greater transition.

Just to re-iterate that the p6-dev wiki page is just a list of 
things we've decided not to implement until post-P5. (It doesn't 
necessarily imply we'll do them at P6, just that we've decided 
that we won't do them as part of P5.) It is of course possible to 
re-examine these decisions at any point. A later elected Council 
may decide the earlier Council was completely wrong and doing X 
is worth breaking backwards compatibility, etc. As we've seen 
from reversing earlier decisions, these are not necessarily set 
in stone (or they are, but we have a hammer and chisel), we just 
shouldn't do so lightly.

In development of a P6 *all* elements would and should be up for 
discussion of inclusion/removal/redefinition. Since one of the 
criteria for needing a P6 is "the emergence of new technologies 
(e.g. the transition from SGML to XML)" the entire way these 
elements function or relate to each other might be different. The 
other criterion for considering P6 is the "development of a new 
architecture that conveys substantial benefit (e.g., the 
development of the new class system)". I'm of the opinion that we 
currently have no proposals that really meet either of these 
criteria. (i.e. that everything we want to do can be done in P5 
or has been deemed too disruptive in itself and is thus put off 
for reconsideration until we're doing other major disruptive 
transitions such as to P6 or later).

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
Academic IT Services, University of Oxford