From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 07:05:28 CDT
In <19991003223028.D29925@demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive@demon.net> writes:
>Charles Lindsey said:
>> "Trimming SHOULD be done by removing sufficient identifiers starting with the
>> second so as to bring the total down to 21."
>>
>> Would that be agreeable?
>No. See my message explaining where I thought the numbers came from.
Then what do you suggest? You message suggested keeping the first, the
last 9, and a more-or-less random selection of the 11 in the middle. What
is gained by that? It seems unnecessary complication to me.
I see no benefit in keeping any of the early ones, except the first. There
might be some advantage in discarding mal-formed ones in preference to
earlier better-formed ones (but those mal-formed ones seem not to mhave
cause problems in the 9 ealier articles in the thread).
The wording suggested above has the advantage of simplicity. For
comparison, my full current working text actually has:
"Followup agents SHOULD NOT trim message identifiers out of a References
header unless the number of message identifiers exceeds 21, in which case
message identifiers SHOULD be trimmed until there are only 21.
Trimming SHOULD be done by removing any incomplete or otherwise broken
message identifiers, and then sufficient identifiers starting with the
second so as to bring the total down to 21. However, software MUST be able
to handle References headers that contain more than 21 message
identifiers."
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5