From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Tue Apr 17 2001 - 13:21:13 CDT
Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se):
>It is to not clear to me that a header is local just because a site makes
>it up at whim.
That is not what I said. I said it was local because it was defined that
way. In fact, it is unlikely that site B made the header up at all, much
less at a whim as you seem to think. It is most likely that someone
pushing the concept of nocems created it, and defined it as local because
they thought it would be.
>If nothing else, no matter whether site C likes this scoring system or
>not, how could it be able to remove the header, if it does not know that
>it is defined as local?
If they don't know what the header is, how could they have made the
decision that they like what it indicates and want to keep it? If you
don't want to spend the time paying attention to the situation as
presented, don't spend the time arguing about it.
>I have to admit that slept over Charles's response, but of course it
>doesn't make sense to claim that any text at the bottom of an article is a
>signature and then require it to be delimited in some way.
The person whose name appears as author of this draft claims otherwise.
He wrote it, isn't his interpretation the most accurate?
>> Which is a violation of the concept that what you don't understand you
>> should not touch. If it isn't a 'back-reference', then it isn't a back
>> reference, and according to the syntax, it can be anything at all.
>
>While in violation of the standards, it is intended as a back-reference.
You now have software pretending it can guess what a poster intended when
he puts "RE:" at the front of a subject. If it isn't a back reference, it
isn't a back reference, and the software should leave it alone. Period.
>You are talking about the theoretical case where "SV: " may open a
>subject line for some other reason,
Well, at that point I was talking about your ridiculous statement that I
should learn Swedish and hang around Swedish newsgroups so I could get a
taste of the "real world". But yes, in general, I'm talking about cases
where "not a back-reference" start subject entries. "SV" is not a back
reference, it is part of the free text that otherwise can appear in a
Subject. We should not be telling authors that they should be playing
games with free text when they don't know why it is there.
>However, in some the of the newsgroups I hang around "SV: "
>and "SV: SV: SV: SV: " etc clearly are due to misbehaving software,
So we should stop it from happening everywhere? Then DEFINE "SV: " as
prohibited text and make it something other than "free text" that is quite
legal. But then, I've already said that this is an issue I care not about,
so if you want it, you have to go for it yourself.
>I you don't like that scheme, fine, just don't use
>my followup agent.
If you don't care that it might screw up an otherwise fine newsgroup, you
ought not be writing followup agents. If this "SV" issue were such a big
problem, people wouldn't post with SV.
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz (Shmuel@acm.org):
>>I am talking about right now. MIME
>>headers are already defined, yet THIS DRAFT says that software
>>SHOULD NOT attempt to interpret them.
>For good reason.
Then do you have an explanation why this draft says that they are
acceptable for use, if they are not acceptable for interpretation?