From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Jun 11 2003 - 06:10:45 CDT
In <BB0B7F93.9702%planb@newsreaders.com> "J.B. Moreno" <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
>I still haven't seen a good reason as to why the back-reference shouldn't be
>part of the syntax -- theoretically it differs from mail, but given that in
>practice the main place I see mail not following this convention is with
>spam ("Re: your order", "Re: your question", "Re: here is a good story", all
>caught within the last couple of days by my filter that looks for a leading
>"Re: " but no References or In-Reply-To), I think the difference is more
>theoretical than actual.
The reason I now prefer a non-syntactic solution is simply that the
syntactic one would forbid an (awkward) user from creating
Subject: Re: Re: foo
I don't think we should care particularly about such unlikely cases, and
for sure we don't want to put agents to the trouble of detecting that case
and throwing it out.
As to normative language, the text I proposed a few days ago says that
followup agents MAY put the "Re: " in (which is not normative), but that
if they do choose to put it in they MUST NOT thereby create "Re: Re: ..."
or "Sv: " etc, and that is indeed normative (and would still be normative
if it were demoted to SHOULD NOT).
I hear Pi, at least, asking to upgrade that MAY to a normative SHOULD, and
several people asking for a firm (even normative) treatment of this in the
Usefor document. And clearly John and Bruce who want to say much less. And
our chair saying that maybe such normative language should not appear in
Usefor.
I am now in listening mode. Somebody suggested a vote - I would hope it
need not come to that.
-- 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