The Deprecation HTTP Header Field
draft-ietf-httpapi-deprecation-header-09

Approval announcement
Draft of message to be sent after approval:

Announcement

From: The IESG <iesg-secretary@ietf.org>
To: IETF-Announce <ietf-announce@ietf.org>
Cc: The IESG <iesg@ietf.org>, draft-ietf-httpapi-deprecation-header@ietf.org, francesca.palombini@ericsson.com, httpapi-chairs@ietf.org, httpapi@ietf.org, rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org, rsalz@akamai.com
Subject: Protocol Action: 'The Deprecation HTTP Header Field' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-httpapi-deprecation-header-09.txt)

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'The Deprecation HTTP Header Field'
  (draft-ietf-httpapi-deprecation-header-09.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Building Blocks for HTTP APIs Working
Group.

The IESG contact persons are Zaheduzzaman Sarker and Francesca Palombini.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpapi-deprecation-header/

Ballot Text

Technical Summary

   The Deprecation HTTP response header field is used to signal to
   consumers of a resource (in the sense of [URI]) that the resource
   will be or has been deprecated.  Additionally, the deprecation link
   relation can be used to link to a resource that provides additional
   information about planned or existing deprecation, and possibly ways
   in which clients can best manage deprecation.

Working Group Summary

It had broad, although at times shallow, consensus. Nobody was ever really
opposed. This is typical of the HTTPAPI WG, which has a mix of people who are
interested in different aspects of HTTP API's.

Earlier in the draft history, there was a suggestion that this concept is really
part of a larger lifecycle for APIs. After a couple of months nobody stepped
forward to work on such a document, and the Chairs decided (backed by no
opposition from the WG membership) to proceed with "just" deprecation.

There was also a (relatively) large amount of discussion around one
particular issue,
https://github.com/ietf-wg-httpapi/deprecation-header/issues/11 The Chairs
determined rough consensus for the authors's proposed resolution.

Document Quality

The draft lists several implementations in Appendix A, including other IETF
work at https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-jcard-deprecation

Implementations and questions have been discussed on many websites, including
StackOverflow, the Python library GitHub, and a blog post (at
https://imhoratiu.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/respectful-rest-apis-sunset-and-deprecation-http-headers/)
which compare header with Sunset (RFC 8594)

Personnel

   The Document Shepherd for this document is Rich Salz. The Responsible
   Area Director is Francesca Palombini.

RFC Editor Note