From: Pete Resnick (presnick@qualcomm.com)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 16:14:56 CDT
There are two separate questions about what we should be documenting
with regard to "Re: ". One is whether we should say it SHOULD be
prepended to subjects. The other is whether we should say that it
MUST NOT be anything other than "Re :".
On 5/1/03 at 10:27 AM -0700, John Stanley wrote:
>There is a specific header designed for this purpose, and agents
>that ignore that header are broken. The author of the agent decided
>this alleged "interoperation" wasn't important, so it's his problem.
There are ways to order a message list for display to the user other
than threaded by "References:". You can sort by date, you can sort by
author, and you can sort by subject. Sometimes you don't all of the
messages in a thread; you only want the ones that have identical
"Subject:" fields. Sometimes people run stupid clients that don't
properly formulate the "References:", yet you want their messages to
appear together with other messages of the same thread, and using
subject is a quick and dirty solution to that problem.
When you sort by subject, you very much want "Re: Differences between
RFC 2822 and Usefor" to sort together with "Differences between RFC
2822 and Usefor", even though some people will use one form and some
people will use the other form. Therefore, it is common practice for
clients to ignore "Re: " at the beginning of the subject, because it
is common practice for people to prepend "Re: " at the beginning of
subjects. It is current common practice WHETHER OR NOT WE THINK IT IS
STUPID.
>>Far better to document the _correct_ way to use it (which 95% of
>>current agents already seem to get right).
>
>Well, if you like jaywalking, I suppose you'd say that it is better
>to document the correct way to jaywalk than to actually stop people
>from jaywalking.
We are not traffic cops; we're traffic engineers. We can't give out
citations for jaywalking; we have no way to stop them from doing so.
We can, however, tell folks how to set their traffic lights to keep
people from wanting to jaywalk, and we can tell people that they're
bound to run over someone if they simply look at the traffic light
and ignore the pedestrians in the street. To wit:
>I.e., I think the point being made is that it is NOT the correct way
>to do this, the correct way to do this is to use the structured
>header already defined for this purpose and not to coerce an
>otherwise unstructured header into double duty.
Perhaps we want to say that in the document. (I'm going to abstain
from comment on whether prepending "Re: " is a good thing or not for
now.) But it is also absolutely incumbent on us to say that "Re: " is
used, that if you're comparing subjects, you should expect to find
"Re: ", and that there are lots of things out there that expect only
"Re :" and no other string and that if you're going to prepend
something to the message, it better only ever be "Re: ".
Given that this is dicussing the contents of a clearly unstructured
field, I think this belongs in USAGE and not in the syntax document.
-- Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com> QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102