What is Deprecation?

The term comes from the word Deprecate , which means to disapprove of something. It's a feature "Going into Retirement" . Deprecation is the discouragement of use of some element or attribute (ex. terminology, feature, design, or practice etc.) that has been outdated by newer constructs. When something is deprecated , the producer or controlling standards body is informed that this way of operating or interacting is becoming obsolete . More importantly, the day will come when some future version will not even allow the deprecated approach.

Deprecated is often encountered in information technology related fields. In its programming sense, deprecation is the process of taking older code and marking it as no longer being useful , usually because it has been superseded by newer code. It is just a natural part of the evolution of software; as software is improved, some features will become obsolete and in this case they will be deprecated . It doesn't mean that deprecated software will behave any differently from software that is not labelled as deprecated. Although deprecated features still remain in the software, their usage may raise warning messages recommending alternative practices, and it may indicate that the feature will be removed in the near future. Typically, this process lasts for several versions of the software, which gives developers ample time to update their code.

An example of a commonly-used element that has been deprecated with the introduction of HTML 5.0 is the font element.

The W3C recommended that the < font > element has been deprecated and fonts should be styled with CSS instead. While modern browsers may still interpret < font > element correctly, it is not guaranteed to work, and therefore should be avoided.

In some cases, especially in software programming, they never actually remove deprecated features . They realize that it offers poor performance, or poor stability, or poor security , and that it shouldn't be used, but at the same time, they don't want to break anything that depend on it. So, they just leave that features there, and encourage everyone to use a newer, better alternatives , while still having the old features available so other developers calling for it find it instead of crashing due to it being missing.

The funniest deprecation in the Java API , is the FontMetrics.getMaxDecent .

Why deprecated?

Deprecation may be applied for various reasons . For ex., applications or software programs may have deprecated features including one of the most common, which is the availability of more practical and effective alternatives , due to security risks or damage to software and devices etc. Moreover, deprecation also occurs when a feature is upgraded , or an alternative option is provided. These deprecated features can still be used, but should be used with caution because they are expected to be removed entirely sometime in the near future .