James Richards wrote:
This is rather a late contribution to this discussion, but my brain
has been working slowly.
Firstly, those who receive the digest (as I do) and then join in the
discussion must completely 'throw' any kind of threading based on
fingerprinting. The most accurate threading for this list would
normally be on the basis of subject line (thrown occasionally by the
odd failure to edit the subject line).
Not if they use a mail client which understands, and respects, the
standards. It would allow either "burst"ing the digest to separate
messages, or replying to an individual item from within a digest.
rfc1153 (the de facto standard for digests, even though not an official
IETF standard) specifies that the message-ID must be retained in the
digest, so the ability to do basic threading is available to all mail
clients - but many of them fail to supply that capability to their users.
Secondly, I had always previously understood the instruction about
starting new topics to mean that I should no start an interesting
discussion about global variables under a subject line referring to
mail threading, but should change the subject line to match the
discussion. I can't be the only person who uses the 'Reply' command
to get a new message all set up and then edits the subject line to
reflect the topic. Indeed I do this all the time since any attempt to
reply to the digest (even on an existing topic) always produces a 'Re:
use-revolution Digest, Vol ##, Issue ##' subject.
For most people, the only advantage of using Reply rather than New
Message (or equivalent command/buttons) is that it fills in the
destination address. Most modern mail clients allow some form of
"address completion" so (for me), a new reply involves typing 4 extra
characters "H" "o" "w" TAB
It seems to me that the standard is not well adapted to a mailing list
of this kind.
The standards were designed to allow for the use of mailing lists and
digests. In fact, mail lists and digests only exist because they are
defined in the standards - and the standards allow for almost all
commonly desired operations.
However, the standards define the file and message formats, not the user
presentation or user facilities, and unfortunately, most mail clients
decided that providing a way to access features weren't important.
--
Alex Tweedly http://www.tweedly.net
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