From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Jul 11 2003 - 09:17:36 CDT
Silence for the last few days, and I haven't even been able to get any
email replies from our Chairman, so maybe he is on holiday, or on his way
to Vienna, or whatever.
We still need to decide what to do about "Re: ". I had hoped that
publication of the full text of duties of a followup agent would have
evoked some response, either of the form "Seen in the context of the other
followup agent duties, that is fine.", or alternatively "This just shows
that 'Re: ' is not the only thing in followup duties that needs trimming
down", or all stages in between.
AFAICS, the present situation (where the text says MAY generate "Re: ",
but if so MUST generate it properly) is that
1. A few people think such things should not be said in a standards
document (though they have no problem with mention in USEAGE).
2. A few people think it essential to mention it in USEFOR, and some even
want to strengthen that MAY to a SHOULD).
3. The rest are in between and would be happy with a range of positions.
Our chairman has declared that there is no problem in principle with such
"MUST do it properly" wording (or similar wording with SHOULD) if that is
the consensus, but he is very dubious about anything stronger in place of
that MAY. However, he has not yet declared what the consensus is.
Another question that needs to be asked is whether there are any other
technical features of the present draft that people want to change. The
full draft-11 is now available. People need to read it and comment
(especially on items therein labelled as not settled).
I would like to move on to the "tidying up the format" phase (including
the split into #1 and #2 if that is decided upon). There is quite a lot of
tidying and rationalization that should now be possible following the
removal of the I18N and USEAGE stuff, but I don't want to embark on that
if there are still technical content issues that are in dispute.
-- 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