From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 01 2004 - 13:56:34 CST
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
> When we last left this discussion topic, the issue revolved around
> whether or not it was a protocol issue, which in turn revolved around
> whether or not sorting (collating) by Subject field body content was or
> was not solely a display issue (i.e. not a protocol issue). I
> maintained that it was solely a display issue, and challenged anybody to
> come up with an example where sorting by subject field had any use other
> than for display. That was many months ago, and to date not one such
> example has been given. I consider that issue settled -- "Re:" is not a
> protocol issue, Subject is unstructured, and our draft should so
> indicate.
I agree with Bruce, with the caveat that I do believe it is important to
tell client authors *somewhere* about the "Re: " convention and make sure
they're aware that basically every existing news client uses it and that
it, while not a protocol issue, is widely expected behavior. While it may
be a display issue, it's a display issue that a lot of people expect.
But this need not be in the standards document. I think it's a perfectly
reasonable thing to explain in the GNKSA document.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>