From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 15:30:36 CDT
Charles Lindsey wrote:
> In <3EAD2C7E.2040007@Sonietta.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>>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.
If the "Re: " hack is removed, i.e. Subject is truly unstructured
and software authors are discouraged from prepending "Re: " while
being required to use References, how exactly is interoperability
affected?
> 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.
1. Removing "Re: " does NOT necessarily give a "base subject":
Subject: Re: is an anachronism
is not a follow-up.
2. If the "Re: " hack goes away, there's *less* work for UAs.
> 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.
That's not being suggested here.
> 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).
It is simpler and more straightforward to avoid Subject hacks entirely,
and that is what is being proposed.