Hi all,

I've been considering introducing a new attribute to links in HAL that
is designed to indicate to clients that a given link (relation) is to
be deprecated. The spec could say something like this:

The deprecates attribute presents a warning to clients that the given
link is due to be removed by the date indicated by the attribute's
value. Clients that traverse a link with a deprecate attribute present
SHOULD take some action to warn their maintainers that this
deprecation is planned (e.g. creating a warning log).

in practice I guess it would look something like this:

{
  "_links": {
    "foo": { "href": "...", "deprecates": "Sun Apr 15 09:08:33 +0000 2012" }
   }

<link rel="foo" href="..." deprecates="Sun Apr 15 09:08:33 +0000 2012" />

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Mike

http://twitter.com/mikekelly85
http://github.com/mikekelly

+1 - however...

One thing that's always (*#&$(*&#($*#'d me off with @deprecated javadoc
in JavaLand is the lack of any form of "see here for the new stuff"
type documentation.

If we're going to add a deprecates attribute, could we also add
superceeded-by-rel="foo2" or something to that affect ( assuming its
replaced by something? ).

Part of thinks this should be some form formal metadata on the rel
URI's documentation, but then it struck me that this is the
deprecatation of a specific link, not the rel itself.

If we do adopt this - can I suggest/mandate we use ISO 8601 date
formats ( http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime ) over some other format?

On Sun Apr  8 21:10:34 2012, Mike Kelly wrote:

I think I'd prefer something more simple like a deprecation-info
attribtue that's just a string that could be included in a warning
log.

But I'm worried this might be over-complicating things a bit.. if the
relation that's being deprecated is a URI pointing to documentation,
that would seem like a natural place to visit for more info anyway?

fwiw, I wasn't intending to draw any distinction there

sure, if everyone else is happy with that?

Cheers,
Mike