Support for lifecycle information

With the increasing number of modules and their variations and classification, it would be useful to "customers" (i.e. drupal.org users) if project maintainers could include a standard lifecycle chart with their modules.

This could be done in a number of ways, but a seemingly efficient way would be to define a specific tag that could be used in project nodes to include such information. In effect, it would probably just be a pre-layout table with specific classes for the lifecycle stages. To produce something like the attached image, it could go like (sample taken from one of my modules):

<lifecycle>
  <component>Taxonews</component>
  <branch name="4-6--1">
    <milestone date="2005-12-01" state="DEV" />
    <milestone date="2005-12-28" state="CURRENT" />
    <milestone date="2007-01-26" state="MATURE" />
    <milestone date="2007-06-12" state="OLD" />
    <milestone date="2007-08-12" state="DEAD" />
    </branch>
  <branch name="4-7--1">
    <milestone date="2005-12-01" state="DEV" />
    <milestone date="2005-12-28" state="CURRENT" />
    <milestone date="2007-01-26" state="MATURE" />
    <milestone date="2007-08-12" state="OLD" />
    <milestone event="Drupal 6" state="DEAD" />
    </branch>
  <branch name="5--1">
    <milestone date="2007-06-12" state="DEV" />
    <milestone date="2007-08-12" state="STABLE" />
    <milestone event="Drupal 6" state="MATURE" />
    <milestone date="2008-01-01" state="OLD" />
    <milestone event="Drupal 7" state="DEAD" />
    </branch>
  <branch name="6--1">
    <milestone date="2007-08-12" state="DEV" />
    <milestone event="Drupal 6" state="STABLE" />
    <milestone event="Drupal 7" state="MATURE" />
    </branch>
  </lifecycle>
  

Such markup would allow :

• future milestones to be automatically (de-)italicized over time,
• the lifecycle chart to automatically include the date of chart update
• avoiding additional work for the maintainer unless he actively wants to change something
• computed cell merging instead of having to hand-tune HTML markup
• user-depended date and time formatting

Or we could even go fancy and generate this as graphics.