From: Seth Breidbart (sethb@panix.com)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 01:42:30 CDT
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> wrote:
> Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> In <200404291729.i3THT8214911@panix5.panix.com> Seth Breidbart
>> <sethb@panix.com> writes:
>>>I still _prefer_ a preference for prepending "Re: " when it's absent,
>>>but I'll settle for neutrality and allow all the existing software to
>>>continue doing that.
>>
>> Thank you for saying that. I know of several others who take that view,
>> but are willing to compromise. The problem is that when I point out that
>> there are such people, and that their views deserve consideration, certain
>> people refuse to accept that what I say as the truth, and they insist that
>> "neutrality" means exactly what they want it to mean, just like Humpty
>> Dumpty.
>
> "Preference" with no supporting rationale is worthless. There is no
> support for such a preference in the defined syntax or semantics. Lacking
> any rationale, it's difficult to take such a "preference" seriously in
> an engineering effort.
You apparently refuse to accept any reasoning that ends with a
conclusion which differs from your desires as having any potential
validity. Despite the probabile futility, I'll try again.
1. As a _reader_ of Usenet, I prefer to see Re: on followups. This
sometimes enables me to more easily find thread beginnings. The
References header doesn't do as well; first, topic changes aren't
picked up (they are imperfectly picked up by Subject changes, but
that's still better than never). Second, broken posting agents
often generate followups (in the sense that people think of them:
articles beginning with an attribution line, quoting a previous
article, etc.) which lack the References header.
2. If the parent article is not available (the likelihood of which
depends on the site the reader is using), presence or absence of
Re: tells whether the Subject header changed (imperfectly, but with
high correlation with accuracy). Therefore, automatically using
Re: sometimes provides information that would not otherwise be
available.
3. A reading agent *cannot* perfectly predict whether an article is a
followup with unchanged header, hence it cannot generate a display
with Re: precisely when a followup agent would have defaulted to
having it.
I have not seen any rationale for disparaging "Re: " other than bogus
arguments like "Subject is unstructured and the user can do anything
he wants therefore we shouldn't default in the most useful way."
Seth