- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:55:18 -0400
- To: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- Cc: nathan@webr3.org, RDF WG <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 13:27 +0100, Richard Cyganiak wrote: > On 8 Apr 2011, at 12:38, Nathan wrote: > > Rather than strictly deprecating certain features, can we modularize them in to another "extensions" specification, or working note, perhaps together with steps publishers / consumers can take to factor them out? > > > > Else, are we versioning "RDF" such that people can tell, oh this is RDF 1 which supports x,y,z and this is RDF 1.x which does not? > > At the Stanford workshop there was a lot of talk about “weak deprecation”, meaning something like: Conforming implementations MUST still support it, but newly created data SHOULD NOT use it. There is no intention of removing the feature entirely in a future version of the spec. > > Going much further than that probably is not desirable, nor really possible given the constraints set by the charter. When I was writing up these issues, I started to use the term "weakly deprecate", then I stopped and looked up the word "deprecate": In computer software or authoring programs standards and documentation, the term deprecation is applied to software features that are superseded and should be avoided. Although deprecated features remain in the current version, their use may raise warning messages recommending alternative practices, and deprecation may indicate that the feature will be removed in the future. Features are deprecated—rather than being removed—in order to provide backward compatibility and give programmers who have used the feature time to bring their code into compliance with the new standard. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation Isn't this exactly what we mean? We could deprecate rdf:Seq but say we wont remove it for at least 99 more years. For some reason, though, everyone seems to think "deprecate" means "remove". So maybe we do have to make up some new word. I'd rather just be clear about them being "deprecated-not-removed". -- Sandro
Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 16:55:34 UTC