From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Mar 13 2004 - 08:55:33 CST
In <87k71p4mii.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Shmuel (Seymour J ) Metz <Shmuel+gen@patriot.net> writes:
>> Seth Breidbart <sethb@panix.com> said:
>> And I would prefer
>> SHOULD by default take the Subject from the precursor, but MAY
>> prepend a single "Re:" is none present. However, that prepending is
>> deprecated and may be prohibited in a future RFC.
>I have no problems with this wording, amusingly. With or without the last
>sentence. :)
Nothing amusing about it at all. Rather it indicates a possible way
forward. I have now reworded it as follows:
2. The Subject-header SHOULD be initialized from the precursor's
Subject-header, except that the precursor's Subject-content (5.4)
MAY first be prepended with the back-reference "Re: " (which is
case sensitive), unless it already begins with "Re: "; however
posters MAY then change this before posting if they wish. The
prepended "Re: " SHOULD NOT be contained within any encoded-word
in the new Subject-content.
NOTE: The practice of prepending such a "Re: " (which is an
abbreviation for the Latin "In re", meaning "in the matter of",
and not an abbreviation of "Reference" as is sometimes
erroneously supposed) is widespread, although it is arguable
whether it should be encouraged to continue since it causes
extra work for reading agents which choose, for example, to
display a list of articles sorted by Subject.
Observe that the wording above precludes any other string except
"Re: " as a back-reference, and specifically NOT a translation
of "Re: " into any local language, and it cannot result in a
Subject-content starting with "Re: Re: ".
[The provision of back-references and their allowed forms are still
under discussion in the Usefor Working Group.]
Notes:
------
1. I have left the bit about encoded-words in for now, but that is
negotiable (see below).
2. It is the "NOTE" paragraphs that need to be looked at now. We could make
them stronger, or weaker. We could insert a reference to [USEAGE] (in any
case, USEAGE is going to take this matter further). We could add more
explanation.
3. I doubt it is yet a consensus, since those on my right (Seth in
particular) still want back references to be more SHOULD-like and less
MAY-like. I would urge all partices to consider whether they could come
together on something close to the above.
As for those encoded-words, we really need to discuss them in a separate
thread. I can see 3 stages to go through:
A. Do we intend that agents that want to regognize a "Re: " (for whatever
reason) do so before or after decoding any RFC 2047 stuff? I suspect that
present practice is to ignore the problem (equivalent to "before").
B. Whichever we decide, do we say it in USEFOR or USEAGE?
C. Whatever we say, how strongly do we say it?
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5