Re: double-check

It's a good question.

In general, the WPD policy (as I understand it) is that deprecated/obsolete
status is NOT reason to delete a page.  The Docs should be comprehensive,
real world documentation of any features someone is likely to come across
when studying web page code.  Deprecated and obsolete status should be
clearly indicated, and these pages should maybe be filtered out of topic
listings and such, but they should still be there for historical record.

HOWEVER, when it is an entire proposed API that is obsolete because the
spec was never completed, the benefit is less clear.  We certainly don't
want to waste time "fixing up" these pages.  However, if they are
reasonably comprehensive to start out with, it does seem a shame to dump
them when they might conceivably be useful as an archival reference.

My recommendation is that the first priority should be to make sure that
the obsolete status (as an abandoned experimental feature) is clearly
indicated and that these pages aren't showing up anywhere they would be
mistaken for active features.  That said, if the community would prefer to
just clear out the clutter, I wouldn't put up too much of a defence.

Best,
Amelia BR


On 4 December 2014 at 11:43, Dave Gash <dave@davegash.com> wrote:

>  Hi all,
>
> I'm working through the remaining large batch of Almost Ready pages,
> trying to promote as many as possible to Ready, and have a question. See this
> search results page
> <https://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Ask&offset=0&limit=500&q=%5B%5BState%3A%3AAlmost+Ready%5D%5D&p=format%3Dbroadtable&po=%3FState%0A&eq=no>
> .
>
>
>
> I'm down to the *filesystem* group, some 60+ pages, and they all seem to
> be obsolete. They reference this 2014 W3C spec
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/>, which says "Work on this
> document is discontinued..."; that discontinued status is also supported by
> various MDN specs like this one
> <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DirectoryEntry> and this
> one <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileEntrySync>, which
> say "This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track..." There
> is even an old W3C spec
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-file-system-api-20120417/> from 2012 that
> references the 2014 "discontinued" document as the latest published version.
>
>
>
> Based on those specs, I've been marking the pages "Not Ready" and
> including "Non-standard; deletion candidate" in the editorial notes, along
> with the discontinued spec references. But I'm a bit uneasy about
> invalidating that many pages at once, and want to make sure I'm reading the
> specs correctly and taking the right action.
>
>
>
> List-ers, do you agree that the W3C specs indicate that the whole
> filesystem page group is kaputski?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>  Dave Gash
>
>
>
>
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