Subject: Re: References

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 14:37:25 -0700 (PDT)

Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Me:  Yes. It is pretty clear that all replies are followups.

>What about, er, replies? In the trn sense.  An e-mail reply to a Usenet
>message. Those are what RFC 2822 more obviously applies to; 

RFC2822 does not say "email replies". Since USEFOR defers to RFC2822, we 
have chosen to expand any "email" limitation of RFC2822 into USENET. If we 
are so pedantic that we say "RFC2822 is EMAIL only" even in the face of 
explicit references to RFC2822 by draft news standards, then exactly what 
headers DOES news have and how are they defined? Many of them are defined 
as "as found in RFC2822". But since those are EMAIL headers, then they 
don't apply to news. Sigh. 

>This thread is convincing me that it's a bit confusing to defer to RFC
>2822 entirely for References when RFC 2822 only talks about replies and
>clearly is intended to focus on mail messages.  Usenet followups are a bit
>of a different beast with historically stronger restrictions on the
>presence of the References header that e-mail is only now starting to
>adopt. 

"Historically stronger" is not found in RFC2119 as a reason for mandates, 
and "historically stronger" is apparently not strong enough to have 
resulted in the mandates being continued into draft-03 of USEFOR.

>I still feel like this could be dealt with definitionally, but
>followups in the Usenet sense have References headers, period.  It's not
>just a SHOULD. 

Currently, it is just a SHOULD. If we choose to return it to MUST, we can 
do so, but what do we use to justify that change, and then, do we have the 
nerve to do it right or do we continue to contradict ourselves?

>Either we define followups by poster intent and some articles with
>Reference headers aren't followups,

The latter does not follow from the former. We can easily (and have, in 
the past) prohibit References headers in non-followups. 

> or we define followups by the presence
>of a Reference header and we can't make a strong statement about intent.

So I can change an article from being a followup to not being a followup
simply by removing one header? It seems odd that I can change the
origination of an article by simply removing a header when his article
reaches me halfway around the world from where he posted it.

>We can't have it both ways; Reference headers are used in practice for
>things other than followups, and I don't expect that practice to change
>(nor do I think we really *want* it to change).

We can solve this problem by simply expanding trivially the definition of 
followup. We don't have to dick with the mandates for when a References 
header is or is not to appear in an article. But "we" chose the latter 
course, to the point that they are now optional and followups are 
indetectable.

Ken Murchison <ken@xxxxxxxxxx>:

>...USEFOR discusses semantics elsewhere so we can and probably should 
>discuss the use of the References header in a more Usenet-centric way.

And exactly what shall our excuse be for ignoring RFC2119 after removing 
mandates regarding a header whose mandates have always been a point of 
debate?

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:06:46 GMT

>don't apply to news. Sigh.

You do have a point there regarding which headers are officially part of
"News".

RFC 2822 defines "Optional fields", so that the following header is
perfectly legal in any email:

      Foobar: bar foo

However, the clear intent of that field was to allow other standards to
define further email headers, such as

      Content-type: text/plain

and have them automatically be acceptable to RFC 2822. It was also
intended to allow any header beginning with "X-". But those intents were
not clearly stated, which is a pity IMO.

The situation was somewhat restored by RFC 3864, which establishes an IANA
registry for email (and also news and HTTP) headers.

What I would like to see in USEFOR is a clear statement that the headers
it explicitly mentions (From, Subject, Newsgroups, etc) are "official
Netnews headers" and that ones it does not mention are "passengers" which
are generally to be ignored by news software, but which should
nevertheless be passed on untouched by transports. Not that I am proposing
to define "passenger" as a technical term for the final document.

Examples of such "passengers" are the Received and In-Reply-To headers,
which are not, and never have been, a part of Netnews, but which do show
up occasionally, especially in articles gatewayed from email.

Indeed, I would go further, and say that any header appearing in a News
article SHOULD either be one blessed by the RFC 3864 registry, or else
should begin with "X-".

In fact, the old draft-13 contained wording of this nature, but it seems
not to have made its way into USEFOR yet.

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