From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Sat Jul 21 2001 - 14:34:32 CDT
"J.B. Moreno" <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> On 7/16/01 4:56 PM, sommar@kairos.kairos.algonet.se at
> <sommar@kairos.kairos.algonet.se> wrote:
> > And it does not really replace the NOTE I suggested for Subject. That
> > note is not about display, but leaving the subject line unchanged.
>
> I have no problem with the intent, but it seems wordy.
>
> I'd rather have something simpler that says the Subject should be unchanged
> other than the addition of "Re: " and the optional correction of "Aw: " and
> other "translated" back references. If the unchanged Subject is an opaque
> sequence of bytes, then everything works as well as it can. You should only
> worry about encoding when posting an "original" Subject (i.e. either a
> totally new article or the user has manually changed the Subject to reflect
> a topic change). This even applies to folding, although to a lesser degree.
Today GKNSA approves has a MUST requirement of not changing the
subject line, and yet it approves newsreaders that does exactly
this. Therefore it appears obvious necessary to spell out that a
change of encoding from unknown to known is a change. (And while
a change of a known encoding from iso-8859-1 to utf8 does not change
the contents, it still is a bad thing for legacy readers.)
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se