Re: Achieving consensus

From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 07:02:06 CDT


In <20040504074618.GA20607@tagseth-trd.consultit.no> Eivind Tagseth <eivindt@multinet.no> writes:

>As a Norwegian, I don't want to see a back-reference like "Re: " in front
>of the subjects. "Re: " has no meaning in Norwegian. Therefore I'd want
>my newsreader to replace that "Re: " into "Sv: " before displaying it
>to me. The problem is that I would only want to have "Re: " translated
>like this when it was used as a "back-reference", and it is impossible
>to tell for a reading agent if "Re: " is a "back-reference" or just
>part of the unstructured subject input manually by the user.

I think that for a reading agent to attempt to translate a "Re: " as
received into "Sv: " for display would be unwise, but still just about
compliant with the draft. I would hope that, when creating a followup, it
would take note of the received/stored text rather than the displayed text
and hence not prepend any further "Re: " or, if this was the first
followup, that it would prepend a "Re: " for use in the text as injected,
even if it displayed it to the local user as "Sv: ".

I think it would be reasonable to apply the translation to any "Re: "
found at the start of the Subject, even at the risk of doing the wrong
thing on, say, 0.1% of occasions.

But I still think such translations would be unwise.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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