I think we should separate out questions about the schema -- whether the "Intended Usage" field being "obsolete" means that the entire registration is obsolete -- from questions about the presentation -- how IANA media type registry information is made available to the community, what it looks like, what other tools are available for finding, reading, marking, downloading, interpreting.
I suggest that the latter is more of a topic for "IETF tools" discussions (tools-discuss@ietf.org), and that we should look generally at making the IANA web pages more useful for its various audiences.
I could not agree more. Putting this sort of thing in registration specification is entirely inappropriate IMO, if for no other reason than these presentation issues tend to apply to mutiple, and maybe even most, IANA registries. There are all sorts of improvements I could envision making to many of the IANA registries, including but not limited to: (1) Better layout and use of things like color indicators. (The fact that these are of no use to some folks doesn't mean they are of no use to everyone.) (2) Nail down the URL used to locate various things (this is a longstanding W3C request, and while I am sympathetic to the IETF view that not everything is a URL, there are real benefits to having some of this stuff in fixed locations.) (3) Dare I suggest an ATOM/RSS feed where all IANA updates get posted? Perhaps even one where incoming requests get sent as well?
As for the former, I think that using the "Intended Usage" field in the registration schema to note registrations that are "Obsolete" is a reasonable choice.
Agreed. Ned