Lisa Dusseault wrote:
2. The ABNF is a candidate for moving from Draft to Full. Will
removing a
rule (that is already in use?) or otherwise changing the semantics of
the
specification, at this point, still permit the document to advance? I
had the
impression that moving to Full was based on some serious beliefs about a
specification's being quite stable. Making this kind of change, this
late in
the game, would seem to run counter to that.
Moving to Internet Standard is indeed something we do carefully, and
of course that means investigating proposed changes to make sure
they're appropriate, and setting a high bar for accepting them. I
believe that's what we're doing here, investigating carefully.
I share your concerns about removing rules that are already in use --
that would generally be a bad thing. However I'm interested in the
consensus around whether a warning or a deprecation statement would be
a good thing.
Removing features that have proved to be a Bad Idea has always been
listed as one of the possible changes from Proposed to Draft - Draft to
Full happens so rarely that I would be hesitant to claim that there's
tradition for such changes there.
Despite this, I agree with the people who think that a warning comment,
rather than removal of the rule, is the Right Way.
Harald
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