From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 15 2004 - 14:43:07 CST
Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Yes, it has grown somewhat, and there are some double negatives. Here is
> a simplification:
> 2. The Subject-header SHOULD be initialized from the precursor's
> Subject-header, possibly preceded by the back-reference "Re: "
> (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.
Here, what about this? Bruce, John, I'd also be interested in your
opinions as to how this sounds and whether you feel like this adds
structure to an unstructured header:
The Subject-header SHOULD be initialized from the precursor's
Subject-header with any initial "Re: " removed, preceeded by the
literal, case-sensitive text "Re: ". Posters MAY change this before
posting if they wish, and therefore reading agents cannot rely on all
followup Subject headers having this format.
The "Re: " convention predates the References header and was
originally used to enable a simple form of thread sorting. With the
more complete and accurate thread information found in References,
strict adherence to this convention is somewhat less important, but it
is still widely used and not following it by default may cause
confused presentation of messages in reading clients.
A change in the Subject away from the above convention is often taken
to signify a sufficient change in topic of a thread as to warrant a
different visual presentation to the reader.
One could toss in a parenthetical about the Latin origins of Re somewhere
if one felt like it.
> If you prefer me to go further, with wording of the form "The
> Subject-header SHOULD by default be ..." with consequent removal of the
> "...if they wish" stuff, then that is fine, but then I would want to do
> the same thing for the Newsgroups and Distribution headers, because
> currently they are all worded in the same style. It would actually
> shorten the whole section somewhat, so I may do it anyway.
I don't think the encoded-word bit is necessary given the wording above.
Newsgroups and Distribution don't have that issue since they don't allow
encoded words in the first place.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>