From: J.B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 11:13:00 CDT
On 6/1/01 11:15 AM, Bill Davidsen at <davidsen@prodigy.com> wrote:
> Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> proposed:
>
>> On Thu, 31 May 2001, Peter Alfredsen wrote:
>>> Ok, I have pieced this together from the other proposed wordings...
>>
>> Generally seems good. It needs to say what the default is, presumably "yes".
>> Also:
>>
>>> The poster of an article must not expect that any post marked with
>>> "Archive: no" will not be made available in one form or another, on
>>> or off USENET.
>>
>> Right thought, but the wording is a bit clumsy. I'd suggest:
>>
>> It is unwise to assume that merely marking an article with
>> "Archive: no" will reliably prevent it from being made available
>> in a long-lived public form; indicating your wishes does not
>> guarantee that they will be respected.
>
> I like the original better, for what that's worth. But if you change
> "It is unwise to assume" to something like "Authors should not assume"
> (or posters) it would be okay. And "merely" seem to add nothing, the
> wording reads fine without it. I don't believe we should comment on
> wisdom in a standard, or to be needlessly verbose.
Actually merely is worse than useless -- it seems to imply that there is
something else that can be done (other than not posting) which /can/
reliably prevent that from happening, which isn't true.
> So:
-snip-
> Authors should not assume that including an "Archive: no" header
> in a post will reliably prevent it from being made available
> in a long-lived public form; indicating your wishes does not
> guarantee that they will be respected.
>
> That's my read on it, while I was rereading I decided that "marking an
> article" was a roundabout way of saying "incude the header" so I said
> it.
That reads fine to me.
> While I'm at it:
> The date= option allows an author to specify a date after which the
> article should no longer be available from public archives. This may not
> be the same as the date after which is is no longer available from the
> normal news spool, if any, which is controlled by site policy and the
> advisory "Expires" header.
>
> Now everyone can shoot at my wording.
Although I think it's a good idea, I'd like to see google express support
for this before including it (frankly I'd like to see something from them
before going ahead with the name change from XNA->Archive, if someone at
Google is reading this, PLEASE chip in with your thoughts).
-- J.B. Moreno