A retired lane keeps one release of served-but-disabled compatibility
The rule
Normative: this is the rule
- A lane leaves the declarable vocabulary as soon as nothing ships it, but leaves the served payload only a major version later, because the two lists answer different questions: what a port may newly declare, and what an editor knows how to connect.
- Dropping both at once breaks every edge on a port declared under the previous release, with no error anywhere; an editor simply reports the connection incompatible.
- A retired lane is therefore served disabled, with its compatibility rules intact, for at least that release, and the retired lanes are named explicitly so that removing one is a deliberate act rather than drift.
Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · SCH-38.a · changed in spec 1.0