From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Wed Feb 04 2004 - 21:18:05 CST
Seth Breidbart (sethb@panix.com):
>In _my_ newsreader, proper operation of the Subject: header allows for
>almost-correct threading when the References: header is missing, as
>sometimes happens (especially in robomoderated groups).
Almost correct? If the articles are broken, then there is no "almost
correct", they are broken. We've already covered the large number of
simple cases where such "almost correct" behaviour is not correct, so
I'll not do so again.
If we want to play guessing games, why not just remove References and go
with structured unstructured headers for all information?
>I consider that to be part of the "news system".
No, how you want your articles displayed is NOT part of "the news system"
and it has nothing to do with "interoperability." You could want them
painted in three foot tall letters on the side of the Chrysler Building,
for all I know, and there is nothing in the protocol that deals with
that, either.
> So what? It's useful for clarifying the _meaning_.
Except it does not do so. According to this clarified meaning, tell me:
does the subject-content "Re: foo bar nockers" have a back-reference or
not? How do you know? How does the opposite answer not also fit the
definition?
> So the ones I'm familiar with assume that it's back-reference,
So they don't have to assume a thing, they look at the References header
and know that the article is not only a followup, but to what other
article it is a followup. No guessing involved. And no, we aren't talking
about trying to fix broken messages by guessing at what they meant --
that's lunacy. They are broken. They aren't articles. We are talking about
people who think guessing about things in properly formed articles is a
reasonable thing to do. That, too, is lunacy, which is easily avoided
by an existing mandatory header containing explicit information that
requires no guessing at all.