From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 08:31:52 CDT
Seth Breidbart wrote:
> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> wrote:
>>"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.
If there is no basis on the defined syntax and/or semantics in the
"reasoning", it is irrelevant to the first document that we're
supposed to produce. If there is no basis on network operations, it
is irrelevant to the second document.
> 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).
Nothing to do with syntax, semantics, or network operations.
> Second, broken posting agents
are irrelevant to this effort, as they do not generate conforming
articles.
> 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
No it doesn't, because "Re: " might very well have been in the
predecessor's subject field. If prepending "Re: " is the *only*
change, that's not terribly interesting. If something else
changed (or didn't change), presence or absence of "Re: " at the
beginning tells one nothing about those changes. What is it
that you are claiming by "presence or absence of Re: tells
whether the Subject header changed"? If all that you have is
one article with
Subject: Re: GWB is not a moron
you cannot tell whether the predecessor's subject was
Subject: Re: GWB is not a moron
Subject: GWB is not a moron
Subject: Re: GWB is a moron
Subject: GWB is a moron
or anything else for that matter.
> Therefore, automatically using
> Re: sometimes provides information that would not otherwise be
> available.
Your claim of "information" under the specified circumstances does
not hold water. It also has no basis in syntax, semantics, or
network operations.
> 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.
So what? there's no rationale there for anything, and no basis on
syntax, semantics, or network operations. What's your point?
> 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."
Then you haven't been paying attention.
Moreover, the issue at hand is the USEFOR document, which need
say nothing at all about "Re:", as I and several others have
proposed, but which our Document Editor has ignored.