Practices no longer recommended or now deprecated

Over the course of a few TEI Technical Council meetings from 2010 to 2012, Council members agreed to establish two different deprecation mechanisms for practices in the Guidelines which are to be phased out at some point. (See a bit of history of the technical implementation.) Here are links to particular meetings where this was discussed:

• April 2010 meeting in Dublin
• April 2011 meeting in Chicago
• November 2011 meeting in Paris
• April 2012 meeting in Ann Arbor

Soft deprecation

"Soft deprecation", sometimes called a "health warning", is a statement in the Guidelines that a practice is no longer recommended. However, no timeline is established for removing particular elements or attributes.

We sometimes assign a ticket to the "Deprecated" category in SourceForge when carrying out a soft deprecation, but this ticket is closed once the Guidelines prose is revised. There is no mechanism to find such statements in the Guidelines to actually remove them.

Examples:

• deprecate <relationGrp> -- See the resulting note on definition of relationGrp
• dictionary entries with a single <sense>
• Use of @key
• <altIdentifier> is deprecated within <msPart> -- Perhaps this should have been done as a hard deprecation. We didn't specify.

Hard deprecation

A bug or feature request ticket is created -- or an existing bug or feature request is reassigned to the "Deprecated" category -- reminding Council members to carry out a deprecation in the future by removing something from the Guidelines. We might change our practice to create a new type of tracker item instead of using a category. In the meantime, we insert @status=deprecated is inserted in the Guidelines ODD(s) to mark the deprecated element or attribute.

Examples:

• deprecate use of gram except as a child of gramGrp -- Kevin is waiting on clarification on whether to create a new ticket and needs guidance on where to put status="deprecated".
• @targets deprecated on <join> -- This was implemented at revisions 8763 and 8808 (but can't find a mention in any minutes, a ticket, or discussion of this on tei-council). I can't find any deprecation ticket for it!