My confusion was that some of that obsolete syntax is officialized in the LDraw.org File Format, whereas some of the information in the Official Library Header Specification is not in the File Format spec. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. At the very least, it should only be in one place. Since the LDRAW_ORG meta is tied closely to the official library, the Header document is probably the better place. And since every file in the library is compliant, I don't really see a need to document any of the obsolete information.
Allen
Allen