From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 10:44:38 CDT
David Barr (barr@visi.com):
> Outlawing or trying to get rid of "Re:" would be in direct opposition
> to the "MAY" language of "Re:" in Subject replies in 2822:
I'll tally you in the column of "those who haven't paid attention to the
discussion" then, shall I? Or do YOU have the list of people who have been
trying to get rid of "Re: " that Charles refuses to supply? I'd love to
see this list, should you deign to provide it.
> That is why 1036 says SHOULD.
It does not. RFC 1036 says:
... the default
subject should begin with the four characters "Re:", ...
Lower case "should", not RFC2119 upper-case. I'll also note that RFC 1036
was incapable of counting to three correctly. (Do you now want to argue
that this draft should talk about "Re:" instead of "Re: ", since that's
what RFC 1036 specifies?)
>That's why the new
>proposed standard should say SHOULD (at minimum).
No, I'm sorry, the fact that old standard did NOT say "SHOULD" is hardly a
reason for this draft to say "SHOULD". Until you can present a real
interoperability issue, there is no reason for stronger language in the
new standard than there has been in either the previous news standard or
the standard that defines the Subject header in general.
The people who created RFC2822 certainly wrestled with this issue, and
even though they say only that References SHOULD be used in a reply, they
did not put any requirements for "Re: " in the Subject. In other words, in
a medium with LESS threading information required in each message, and
probably a lot more users, they decided that "Re: " did not meet the
requirements for RFC2119 language or anything more than that it MAY be
used, and only "ought" to be there once!
>It's widely accepted, universally performed, and perfectly understandable
>behavior that only a few in this group don't seem to understand or
>appreciate.
You can't convince someone else that "Re: " is an interoperability issue
worthy of RFC2119 language and a special redefinition of the Subject
header in the news standard, so you'll misquote the previous standard and
claim the other side just doesn't understand. Perhaps it is you that does
not understand what the real discussion is about? It's not got anything to
do with getting rid of "Re: " (or "Re:", as RFC 1036 refers to it, and.)