- From: Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:06:49 +0200 (EET)
- To: Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de>
- cc: Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
On 2010-01-15, Michael Schneider wrote: > I just asked, because I remembered having seen this term "quiet > deprecation" more than once being used in this thread, and I wondered > whether there is something important that I have missed. I think the difference is rather simple. A quiet deprecation would have been one that wasn't discussed out in the open like this, with the relevant working group just deprecating the feature. Perhaps in an unobtrusive footnote in a minor revision of the standard, an addendum to it, or perhaps an "application note". Given some sort of divine anti-online intervention nobody would have consciously noticed, and in a year or two some magic, memetic cross-transfer would have caused everybody to cease using the feature, whereupon it could be declared obsolete without any further hassle. With artifacts of the ISO era that sometimes actually happened. The difference is that nowadays there is no "silent" *anything*. If it's picked up by someone, it's going to be raised as a question on one list or another, and the full trail behind the decision is going to be picked up within instants. Today, there's no real possibility of a "silent" deprecation, every deprecation has to be formal, and then, in fact, very few standards bodies hold the power to even *formally* deprecate anything -- people'll just fork if they feel like it. That's just what competition in an environment of continually more fully shared information is all about. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - decoy@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Received on Friday, 15 January 2010 19:07:32 UTC