From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Thu Apr 01 2004 - 12:46:47 CST
Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk):
>Well it may be judging, and it may be guessing, but it is what you have
>been advocating by your repeated assertion that "no reference"
>automatically means "new thread".
What an amazing twist of language you went through to pretend that I said
something I did not.
Notice how Eivind said "omission of a back-reference", you converted that
to "no reference", and them implied that I thought this was the same as
"no References header".
No Charles, "omission of a back-reference" is not the same as "no
References header". "Omission of a back-reference" can happen for any
number of reasons, and has no defined meaning. "No References header"
is the defined method of indicating that an article is not a followup.
Just to make it clear to you, Charles, I have NEVER said that the lack of
a back-reference indicates the start of a new thread. Not once. What I
have said, and what you have deliberately misinterpreted here, is that the
lack of a REFERENCES header indicates the start of a new thread, by
definition, in published standards that have been around for DECADES.
>The problem is that the usage is almost universal, so we cannot suddenly
>declare it to be obsolete.
And here we are again, trying to argue this straw man. Even were anyone
arguing that we make such a declaration, you are wrong. We certainly can
declare something that is in current use as obsolete, just as we have done
with other things when we decide they need to be changed.
But that's not the issue here, and you know it.
>I have seen threads entirely fragmented as a consequence of that.
Only a broken reading agent will "entirely fragment" a thread based on a
changing subject header.
>Which is precisely what my latest text does. Can I take it that you could
>live with that text?
I can live with any of the text I've written. Since I don't know what text
you are referring to, and you repeatedly claim that what you have written
doesn't say what it does, I will not take your word for it that "your
latest text" in any way matches what I wrote. Distribute your "latest
text" for this section, in its entirety, in public, and then ask again.
>In <4065FF47.7050409@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>>Moreover, you have not addressed the objections to the "warrant a
>>different visual presentation" text.
>That sentence (the 2nd sentence of the 2nd paragraph of the NOTE) actually
>came from Russ. I agree that it does not add much (and it will arise again
>in USEAGE) and I would have no problem removing it.
If we deal with it now, why would it arise again in USAGE? I'm tired of
having to debate the same issues in both USEFOR and USAGE. Those two
documents should be mutually compatible. If we admit that the user has no
ability to control the "visual presentation" of articles to the reader in
USEFOR, then the same will be true when we discuss USAGE, and USAGE should
convey the same message.
Eivind Tagseth (eivindt@multinet.no):
>It's not my intent to specify structure in the subject header. I'd like
>the protocol specification to specify that the subject header is
>unstructured. I'd also like a note explicitly saying that any back-reference
>(such as "Re: ") is not part of the protocol.
>For USEAGE, there should be a more detailed description of back-references
>and how they should be used and not used.
This is exactly the thing that I just mentioned. Either there is the
structure and we redefine the header to indicate that, or there is no
structure and we write BOTH documents to indicate that. To say in USEFOR
that there is no structure, and then in USAGE "this is how you structure
that unstructured header" is just ridiculous.