From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2003 - 04:51:12 CDT
In <Pine.LNX.4.53.0306190811001.11381@a.shell.peak.org> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
>David Barr (barr@visi.com):
>> 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?)
In the days when RFC 1036 was written (which was long before RFC 2119),
people were not so fussy about distinctions between "should" and "SHOULD".
So you cannot argue on that basis.
In any case, most arguments based on RFC 1036 are fallacious out of the
box, because RFC 1036 cannot nowadays be regarded as the definition of
Netnews. At most, it offers a basis and strong guidance.
In fact, what governs Netnews presently is 20% RFC 1036 and 80% folklore.
The folklore is largely undocumented - the notable excpetion is the big
chunk of folklore known as Son-of-1036, but then there is further folklore
on top of that to tell you which bits of Son-of-1036 you can ignore.
The whole purpose of our present endeavour is to provide something more
substantial than folklore. Strangely, Usenet currently works rather well
because the folklore is clear as to what should happen - in those cases
our standard simply codifies those current understandings. In other cases,
the folklore is confused, or inadequate, or inconsistent, or whatever. In
those cases we may have to make some hard choices.
But basing our decisions solely on what RFC 1036 says, unless the folklore
on the particular topic is still in line with RFC 1036, is pointless.
-- 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