From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Mar 24 2004 - 06:28:55 CST
In <4060FB56.5090603@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> In <405E8B63.6030900@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>>For more insight into what In-Reply-To adds, consider
>>>http://users.erols.com/blilly/mparse/usefor/ref+irt.png
>>>and
>>>http://users.erols.com/blilly/mparse/usefor/ref-only.png
>>
>>
>> Your examples are interesting, but your interpretation of them is
>> incorrect.
>You're being a bit presumptuous, since I came up with the example.
But you failed to state how the References header was to be constructed in
your presumed extension to the existing protocols.
>RFC 2822 does explicitly address the case, but stops short of giving
>rules for constructing References. In the example, each message's
>References field has the following properties, which are consistent
>with the rules for a response to a single message:
>1. Each message which is an ancestor is mentioned
>2. The last message-id is one of the immediate predecessors
Yes, that is one set of possible properties.
>Message-ID: <z>
>References: <a> <q> <c> <r> <d> <s> <h> <t> <i> <u> <k> <j> <w> <v> <l> <x>
>In-Reply-To: <l> <x>
>Edges: 1 3 7 11 15; 1 5 9 11; 5 12 15; 2 4 8 14 16; 2 6 10 14; 6 13 16
>where each semicolon-separated sequence in Edges lists a path
>through directed edges of the corresponding message-ids in the
>References field. So a is an immediate predecessor of c, c is
>an immediate predecessor of h, etc. That contains all of the
>information necessary to construct the entire dependency graph
>without the need to examine any other messages.
Indeed so. But the whole point is that it is not necessary to construct
the entire dependency graph in order to provide an acceptable presentation
of articles within a newsreader. The Zawinski algorithm already does it
pretty well assuming a fairly crude extension to the rule for contructing
the References header (and would do it even better with a small tweak to
fix that bug).
-- 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
