From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Thu Apr 01 2004 - 21:56:45 CST
On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, John Stanley wrote:
> >> A very nice condemnation of the "Re: " hack, I will note.
> >Only if you ignore that "in the Netnews environment" part. If "Re: " is
> >defined to be meaningful in news, there's no conflict.
>
> In which RFC regarding news is "Re: " defined to mean something?
All the RFCs -- severely obsoletely though they both are -- regarding news
article format specifically call for this sequence to be prepended to the
Subject contents (unless overridden by the user) when preparing a
followup. Although they do not discuss their motives for doing so, the
obvious inference is that its presence will be meaningful to the human
reader and thus (possibly) to his software agent. (Any meaning thus
conveyed is not *reliable*, because a human poster can override the
sequence's presence in a followup or add it to a non-followup, but
information does not have to be absolutely reliable to be useful.)
The RFCs whose drafts we are working on at this moment could similarly
define it so (preferably more explicitly and with more explanation), or
could refrain from doing this. In neither case is there an inconsistency.
But it is the height of obstructionism to claim that they cannot do so
because no other RFC has done so, when *all* the news RFCs in fact have,
and when it is our decision whether to follow their lead or not.
> Since the Subject header is not defined to carry such information in a
> netnews environment...
I'm actually inclined to agree with this, but only because you phrased it
that exact way. The netnews Subject header, in the past, has not been
defined clearly enough to say whether it carries such information -- i.e.,
it is *not defined to* carry such information. But that's different from
saying that it's *defined not to* carry such information.
It is our job to define it. One way or the other.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net