- From: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:35:27 -0400
- To: www-qa-wg@w3.org
- Cc: Lynne Rosenthal <lynne.rosenthal@nist.gov>
- Message-Id: <1215A05D-C94B-11D8-8A27-000A95718F82@w3.org>
Lynne, Yours to review ;) D.4 Deprecation Previous: --------------------------------------------- Good Practice: Specify the degree of support required for each deprecated feature and its conformance consequence. Consider the effect of deprecation on all classes of products that implement the specification (e.g., authoring tools, user agents). --------------------------------------------- Proposal: --------------------------------------------- Good Practice: Define how to handle each deprecated feature Meaning: A feature is usually defined when there is a better mechanism inside the technology, or another technology that could be used, to achieve the same effect (with often more possibilities). It is important to define the behavior of the different kind of products when they have to read or produce deprecated features. The feature is likely to become obsolete in the next version of the technology. Care: It will help to establish transition/evolution strategies for the users of the technology. It will help a consistent behavior when the technology is implemented in different products and will be particularly helpful when products can deal with different versions of the technology. For example, should a tool, able to read an old version of the document, propose helping mechanism or conversion to the new method which are preferred. Related: D3. Define error handling for unknown extensions Technique: 1. Consider the effect of deprecation on all classes of products that implement the specification (e.g., authoring tools, converter, user agents). 2. Specify the degree of support required for each deprecated feature 3. Define its conformance consequence. Examples: "HTML 4.01" [0] In the conformance section of HTML 4.01, there is the definition of deprecation and what user agents should do. Though the behavior for other kind of products is not defined. quote [1]: "User agents should continue to support deprecated elements for reasons of backward compatibility." [0]http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/ [1]http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/ conform.html#deprecated MathML 2.0 describes deprecated MathML 1.x features in terms of MathML-output-conformant authoring tools, MathML-input-confomrant rendering/reading tools, and MathML-roundtrip-conrormant processors. --------------------------------------------- -- Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/ W3C Conformance Manager *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***
Received on Monday, 28 June 2004 19:25:35 UTC