On 12/02/2003 at 14:51 +0000, Mark Fowler wrote:Whee, I'm having fun doing the summary this week. Everything's going all over the place.It'd just make doing the summaries (and finding posts in the archives) easier.
Finding posts in the archives would be much easier if there was an X-Suggested-Archive-URL header (or similar), and if archiving software honoured it. Mind you, I said this a year and a half ago and nothing happened about it then either. I just thought I'd chuck the concept about again and see if it stuck any harder this time. On 12/02/2003 at 15:25 +0000, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
I've always wondered about adding the "was Re" appendage. I mean, if you are following the old thread it should be obvious what's happening. If you haven't been following the old thread, then it doesn't help you to know that the new one grew out of the old one.
It does if threads break. Which brings us to...
Most modern software supplies either References: or In-reply-to: headers. However, the most popular modern software (guess whose) doesn't supply these. Then there's webmail, which tends to be spectacularly crappy too.In fact, I daresay clever modern software does message threading based on something smarter than pattern matching the subject line (oh, tell me that's true), so we could (steady now) change the subject every time we replied, subtly changing it to reflect (radical I know) the contents of the message:
Some people still even read mail in non-threaded apps.
The classic mail threading algorithm would still appear to be jwz's one outlined at http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html - although it could now be surpassed by something less famous.
If you want to see how often threading fails, just visit the web archives:
http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20030210/thread.html
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:: paul
:: we're like crystal
