Decision: How to display reserved locations

Thing	Info
Relevant features	Content
Date started	2022-07-14
Date finished
Decision status	Tentative
Summary of outcome

Background/context

Several of our regulation parts in scope have "reserved" subparts and sections. They say "reserved" in the name/title and are otherwise blank, without any regulation text.

Core questions

In tables of contents, how should we treat reserved subparts and sections? Should they be normal clickable links? Or should they be greyed out and inactive?

On content pages, how should we treat reserved subparts and sections? Should we display text informing readers about what "reserved" means?

What we know

Subject matter background

The Government Publishing Office has an official explanation for what "Reserved" means:

"[Reserved]" is a term used as a place holder within the Code of Federal Regulations. An agency uses "[Reserved]" to simply indicate that it may insert regulatory information into this location some time in the future. Occasionally "[Reserved]" is used to indicate that a portion of the CFR was intentionally left empty and not accidentally dropped due to a printing or computer error.

Any portion of regulation (part, subpart, section, paragraph, etc.) can be marked reserved, but it's most common to see a reserved subpart or section.

CMS sometimes removes a subpart or section (via a Final Rule) because it is obsolete. CMS usually renames the deleted subpart or section to "Reserved" and blanks out the text, instead of completely removing the location, to indicate that it wasn't accidentally dropped.

Ramifications for eRegulations

A reserved subpart or section may have associated resources. For example:

• A proposed or final rule that updated the content that used to be in that location
• A proposed or final rule that removed the content (and marked it as "reserved")
• A piece of guidance related to the content that used to be in that location

Potential user stories:

• People may find it helpful to look up a subpart or section mentioned in some older document, find out that it's reserved, and see the related resources for the previous content.

User experience

• Learners may not understand what "reserved" means.
• Researchers usually know what "reserved" means.
• Knowledge Keepers definitely understand what "reserved" means.

(See Audiences for background.)

Decision

This what we are currently doing on production, and it seems fine, so we're sticking with it for now:

• In a regulation part homepage Table of Contents, reserved subparts are normal clickable links, but reserved sections are greyed-out
• On a regulation content page, reserved subparts and sections are treated normally; they can have associated resources
• We are not displaying any special informative text about what "reserved" means, but we can revisit that later

Consequences

We'll keep the prototype site (for usability testing) as approximately matching the production behavior.