From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2001 - 02:03:37 CDT
J B Moreno <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> On 4/23/01 11:45 PM, Russ Allbery at <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> I don't understand your logic here. Two SHOULDs are equivalent to one
>> SHOULD in determining conformance. I don't believe a conforming
>> implementation should be permitted to return invalid Xref information,
>> at least to the extent of ensuring that the newsgroup and article
>> number information is accurate (I don't care about the path portion).
>> Invalid Xref information breaks clients.
> Speaking of Xref...the biggest problem I see is servers that don't
> provide all of the groups, and thus don't include all of them in the
> xref header.
Given that the intended use of Xref information by the client is to mark
as read in other newsgroups a crossposted article, this isn't a problem.
If the server doesn't carry the other newsgroup, the client can't be
reading it from that server, and therefore there's no need to mark the
article as read in that group.
I'm guessing you're instead thinking of using Xref for killfiling
crossposts; that's not actually it's purpose, and it just happens to be
used for that because it's frequently in overview. Newsgroups would
actually be better for that purpose; for one thing, the syntax is more
regular.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>