From: Boris 'pi' Piwinger (3.14@logic.univie.ac.at)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 01:25:19 CDT
John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> wrote:
>Subject: In tha matter of: Subject-header and "Re: "
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I suggest to return to the original strong wording.
Obviously, this is trolling only.
>> Although a few people wanted to remove all mention of "Re: " from
>> the draft ...
>
>God damn it Charles, if you cannot bother to understand what other people
>are saying, then stop trying to make things up and speak for them.
IOW: Ignore them.
>> Followup agents MUST NOT use any other string except "Re: " as a
>> back-reference, and specifically NOT a translation of "Re: " into a
>> local language, and they MUST NOT prepend a "Re: " if one is already
>> present.
>
>> Although the addition of the back-reference "Re: " is not required,
>> it is the normal practice, and followup agents SHOULD do it.
>
>I've yet to see ANY serious argument that this kind of language is
>necessary in a news standard.
Why don't we start with an argument why this should be
changed? It works perfectly.
>"My broken USENET-ignorant client cannot
>mark something as a reply when I read news with it" is not sufficient
Which clients do this?
Let me repeat: The subject is used for various purposes.
With Re: you can in a list which displays only subjects see
if this is a followup or not. That agents could put a Re:
there if it is missing is not convincing. Other things like
the very funny joke, not!, in this subject are not helpful
and don't show up in real life (at least after applying an
appropriate kill file).
Further, it is very useful to be able to display subthreads
with a new subject as a new thread. This breaks if you do
allow other things.
>>I really don't see why this should not be mandatory or at
>>least a SHOULD. It will do more harm if it is there
>>inconsistently.
>
>It does no harm if it is there, if it isn't there, or if it is there three
>times.
Yes, it does. It is confusing for humans who read. I
understand that you don't care about that, since in theory
the perfect reader could correct all that nonsense. But why
introduce it in the first place?
>Any USENET client can thread articles properly without anything at
>all in the Subject header.
But (see above) you can do much better, if things are done
properly.
>>The reasonable assumption is that when
>>resolving a difference where *one* of the many protocols differs
>>from *all* of the others, it is likely that the best resolution of
>>the discrepancy involves changing the odd man out.
>
>This isn't even an odd-man-out issue. It's an issue of JUSTIFYING the
>creation of a difference. The difference between RFC2822 and this draft in
>the matter of the Subject header cannot be justified
I don't know if you ever used e-mail, but there Re: is used.
pi