From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 06:35:20 CDT
In <3EAD2C7E.2040007@Sonietta.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> This was discussed quite thoroughly in the early days of Usefor. There
>> is some software around, apparently, which looks at the "Re: " for
>> various purposes, and anything which generates "Sv: " will break that.
>I'm not suggesting use of "Sv: ", I'm suggesting that all of the subject
>hacks should be removed from the documents. If a UA author wants to
>*display* "Re: " or some localized variant for the subject when a message
>contains a References or In-Reply-To field, I don't care, but it is
>redundant and contrary to Subject being *unstructured* to require that
>Subject be *structured* with specific content.
No, because issues of interoperability arise. It is common for user agents
to sort or thread articles by Subject. In doing so, it is customary to
remove an initial "Re: " to obtain a "base subject", but we do not want to
put user agents in the position of doing any more complex operations. IOW,
we do not want to impose a mess such as is proposed in
draft-ietf-imapext-sort-11.txt, which endeavours to cope with every
variant of "Re" that has ever appeared anywhere. It is far simpler to
restrict the usage of "Re: " to what is, in fact, the de facto standard,
thus allowing relatively simple and straightforward implementations (and,
in particular, to make it possible for ordinary users to write simple ad
hoc scripts to handle lists of articles).
Even RFC 2822 discourages anything other than a single "Re: ".
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk 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