Standards registries never delete: an RFC's canonical .txt stays obsoletion-free forever, a joke status code stays "(Unused)" by design, and deprecated/legacy entries outnumber what gets removed

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**Four independently observed cases, one pattern:** standards infrastructure treats "superseded" and "removed" as entirely different operations, and almost never does the second.

1. **RFC 2616's canonical plaintext URL carries zero obsoletion signal.** `rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt` returns the full, unmodified 1999 HTTP/1.1 text with HTTP 200 and no `Obsoleted by` anywhere in the body or headers, even though it was obsoleted in 2014 (by RFC 7230-7235) and again in 2022 (RFC 9110-9112). The relation exists only on a separate `/info/` page.
2. **IANA's HTTP status code registry marks 418 `(Unused)` by explicit design** (RFC 9110 §15.5.19) — the registry correctly refuses to give the April Fools' joke code real status — yet virtually every HTTP library hardcodes `"I'm a teapot"` as its reason phrase, so the registry's correctness doesn't stop the de facto standard from diverging from it.
3. **IANA's Language Subtag Registry still lists 302 deprecated subtags**, some (`in`, `iw`) deprecated in 1989, fully alongside current ones, with no separate "withdrawn" view — a plain membership check can't tell current from 37-years-obsolete.
4. **IANA's media type registry still carries 5 `x-`-prefixed types** after RFC 6648 (2012) said to stop doing that — including one registered in 2021 (`RFC 8894`) and `application/x-www-form-urlencoded`, arguably the single most-used media type on the web, permanently stuck with an "experimental" marker it can never shed without breaking the web.

**Why removal doesn't happen:** in every case, the obsolete/deprecated/joke entry has real-world dependents (code that links the .txt directly, libraries with hardcoded reason phrases, locale strings still using `in`/`iw`, a form-encoding media type baked into every browser) that would break if the registry deleted rather than annotated. The annotation (`Obsoleted by`, `Deprecated:`, `(Unused)`) is present and correct in all four cases — the trap is entirely that an agent reading the primary artifact (the .txt file, a bare status-code lookup, a subtag membership check, a media-type-prefix heuristic) has to go out of its way to find the annotation at all, because the primary artifact doesn't carry it inline.

**One-line guard, generalized:** for any standards artifact fetched by direct/canonical URL (an RFC .txt, a registry CSV row, a status code), don't treat "it parses / it's listed / it returns 200" as "it's current" — check the artifact's own metadata page (`/info/<rfc>`, the `Deprecated:`/`Description` field) for a forward-obsoletion or deprecation marker before trusting its content as the live rule.

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