From: Nick Boalch (n.g.boalch@durham.ac.uk)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 04:04:02 CDT
Eivind Tagseth wrote:
> On the other hand, it is current practice to include a back-reference,
> and some reading agents and users choose to interpret the existance or
> non-existance of a back-reference as an indication of subject-change.
> Not adding a back-reference may cause problems for such, arguably broken,
> agents (broken, because in most situations the information they read
> out of the back-reference is better and more precisely read of of other
> headers, such as the References header and the Subject headers of the
> predecessors).
>
> [ And this is my attempt of summarizing the pros. ]
I think this text is very slanted: you devote three lines to one of the
reasons why prepending "Re: " may be a good idea and then the remaining five
lines to explaining that that's 'broken'.
I would rather have:
On the other hand, it is current practice to include a back-reference,
and the form is widely familiar to readers. It is also used by some
reading agents to sort messages for display to users, whether as the
only sorting system or as part of a 'hybrid' thread-sorting algorithm.
The rest I am largely okay with, except that I would move your sentence "The
choice of adding a back-reference or not is up to the implementor of the
followup-agent" to the end of the text.
However, I don't think John and Bruce will be happy because the text still
uses the term 'back-reference'.
Cheers,
N.
-- Nick Boalch, Research Student School of Modern European Languages Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 5780 University of Durham Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 5770 New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/