Archiving obsolete specifications: where, or why not?

Hello everyone,

TL;DR: It would be great if obsoleted specs were archived somewhere (and doubly great if their old links redirected).

I’m a developer on a small team that tries, when possible, to use open data formats. About four years ago I came across the LinearTSV spec at Linear TSV - Data Protocols - Open Knowledge Foundation, thought it was awesome, and implemented it in our product. Recently I discovered that that link is broken, and the spec is (apparently) nowhere to be found at the successor website frictionlessdata.io. Asking around, I learned that the functionality of LinearTSV has been folded into the CSV Dialect spec, which is probably a Great Thing™, but the broken links in our doc wiki make me sad.

Does an archive exist, but my puny google-fu is insufficient to locate it? If not, I’d like to ask the specification process shepherds to consider the plight of small teams who are struggling to do the right thing but do not have the resources to instantly respond to the latest hotness. The IETF does this right, every published RFC and I-D is kept forever and marked “Obsoleted by: …” when the time comes.

Can the same or similar process be instituted here? Because, you know, friction.

Thanks for reading this far!
Mike

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Hi Mike,

Great point on archiving outdated specs, we’ll see how to avail them.

For now, the Frictionless Data specs repository is a safe spot to check for these old specs.

Here’s a link to the linear-tsv spec write-up: specs/index.md at c8ac05c56cd00695fb215454c0e5a6f3d9c6e899 · frictionlessdata/specs · GitHub

Hope this helps.

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Super! Thanks, Serah!

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