Re: Deprecated or not?

Murray Altheim:


> Bertilo Wennergren wrote:
> [...]
> > I guess one could interpret "support for deprecated elements" as "support for
> > SOME deprecated elements". I however read it as "support for ALL deprecated
> > elements", as I suppose most people would. <applet> seems to be the one big
> > exception, so it would seem appropriate to mention that somewhere.
> > 
> > To make things clear: I have nothing against the applet element. I just
> > want to understand the goings on.

> Well, I apologize that we haven't covered all the bases in our specs. 

No apologizing needed. I do appreciate the work you're doing.

> There's a lot of material and we've tried to keep them smaller rather
> than larger. I must admit I didn't think people would expect so much
> by way of reasons *why* in a specification. It's not that common.

It's more a matter of a seeming contradiction in the text. Since I
had a pretty good grasp of which elements are deprecated in HTML 4 when
I read the specs, I didn't just skim over the phrase that says that
the deprecated elements have been gotten rid of. I read it as "that and
that and that particular element, including <applet>, is gone". So when
I found the applet module mentioned in another place, I thought I must
have misread something. So I checked back in the HTML 4 specs to see if
I had dreamt up the deprecation of <applet>, and so on...

I'm writing a detailed presentation of XHTML so I need to get things
right.
 
> But you've got the gist of it. We *would* have removed <applet> except 
> that <object>'s support of Java applets is still pretty spotty. I think 
> even the folks at Java Software would like to see <object> succeed as 
> <applet>'s successor, but it hasn't happened yet. So it remains.

OK.
 
> I think people make too big a deal on whether something is deprecated or
> not. There's no formal definition of what deprecated really means in 
> terms of EOL'ing features.

It even seems to me that the term and notion "deprecated" is not really
used anymore in XHTML 1.1 etc.

> Every year a word seems to come up in my life that serves somewhat as a
> theme. This year my word is 'simplification'. Everything I see needs some
> pretty heavy simplification. The most successful specs are usually the
> simplest,

I tend to agree.

> if that's a clue to *anybody* listening in say, the XML Schema
> WG. It's one of the reasons why <object> never worked: 36 attributes.

Ooops...
 
Thanks for the clarification!

======================================================================
                         Bertilo Wennergren
                     <bertilow@hem.passagen.se>
                  <http://purl.oclc.org/NET/bertilo>
======================================================================

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 05:48:31 UTC