End-of-lifing dead documents in /TR/

Hi all,

I think that one regular issue with the way we work that is easily fixable is to flag documents that have been published to /TR/ but are no longer being worked on as such. Sometimes a WG will realise that one of the deliverables it had been working on is no longer useful, groups run out of steam, etc. But then the document stays.

I strongly believe (if only because I get that sort of question on a very regular basis) that we need to be clearer in our status to outside stakeholders. We should therefore have a way of flagging dead (or very dormant) documents as such in a very clear manner. For Recommendations there is the Rescinded state with its classy teenage Goth style (http://respec.specifiction.com/guide/eg/boilerplate.html?specStatus=RSCND) but for anything that hasn't reached Rec we have nothing but republishing as WD with a warning... which is rarely done.

To take just one example look at http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-fragment, the Candidate Recommendation for XML Fragment Interchange which has been in this state since... February 2001. If you miss the date (which, unless you're one of the people here, you probably will) you might think that this is something hip, hot, and coming in the XML world. It may seem obvious to those here that it isn't, but I remember getting questions from tools vendors as late as 2006 about whether they should support this one.

The current process for this as per §7.5 is to move the draft to a Note. I think that that's a useful step, but "visually" insufficient. It would be useful if there were a stylesheet for "dead" documents that could be swapped in and some common boilerplate used.

I don't think we need to amend the Process for this (or at least not much) — just the CSS + boilerplate should be enough. It may be useful to go through ancient drafts and perform some cleanup as well.

WDYT?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Wednesday, 16 November 2011 16:32:32 UTC