[iaufwg] INHERIT convention

[Doug Tody]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Clive Page wrote:

> The next question is whether each convention can be annotated in some
> way to mark it as either approved or deprecated (perhaps with reasons
> if the latter, e.g. superseded by some later convention).  That would
> also be a nice to have, but I don't think we have a mechanism for
> doing that at present.  Maybe a working group could be set up to do
> the approving, but it might not be easy to reach consensus on each
> convention.  It might also be politically difficult to deprecate a
> convention that is in active use by some small group of users.

I don't think we can approve or deprecate a convention without getting
into the standardization process, which is contrary to the point of
a convention.  Basically, if the IAUFWG "approves" or "recommends"
a convention it becomes a standard.  What would likely happen if we
tried to do such a thing formally, is that we would throw out almost
every single one of these conventions (I would not recommend HIERARCH,
but someone else might not recommend INHERIT).  I think defining the
difference between a standard and a convention, and just documenting
conventions uniformly, with formal comments from the IAUFWG, without
attempting to make a recommendation, is sufficient.  It is similar
to an IVOA Note for example.

Personally I have no problems with having both standards, and
conventions layered upon standards.  The existence of such conventions
is in some degree a sign of a healthy and actively used standard.
Often the conventions target some narrower problem, specializing
the more generic standard for some more specific purpose, where a
broad standard is not appropriate or would be too expensive and time
consuming to produce.

 	- Doug