Subject: Re: #1047 (was: Old ticket status - USEFOR - Jan 3, 2006)

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:58:01 -0800 (PST)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>Your response seemed more intent on saying that diagnostics should be
>outlawed entirely than on saying that, if present, they should be
>identifiable as such.

Only if you didn't read my response. Quote:

]USEFOR specifies article syntax, yes? Is there a reason to HAVE a 
]"diagnostic"? If so, then yes, USEFOR must specify a syntax that allows 
]one to tell the difference.

First three sentences of the paragraph.

Only after that did I point out that the "openness" of the question of 
being able to detect diagnostics called into question the need for them. 
If you don't think they need to be differentiable from path-identities, 
then why should they exist outside the path-identity? Do you have some 
"need" to describe? How is the system already in place broken?

If your only "need" is so that colons can be inserted into the path header 
and you think that we need a poorly defined thing called a 
"path-diagnostic" to do that, think again. There are two trivial solutions 
to creating yet another entity that has no definition, but I'll let 
you see if you can come up with them. (And only one of them is the trivial 
"encoding" of IPv6 that doesn't use colons.) Hint: the other one rhymes 
with "rattus flow".

>But if you are agreeing that, if/when present, they should be
>identifiable as such,

I am "agreeing" with nothing. I said what I said. There was a question
and I answered it.

>If nobody disagrees, then perhaps we can now
>proceed to implement that feature (by adding a "SEEN" keyword, or any
>other mechanism people may care to suggest).

I disagree with adding fluff that has no real purpose, and yet another
path-keyword that still isn't a path-diagnostic.

>>If the difference is significant
>>enough to spend time debating like this, then it is important enough to
>>define and differentiate. If not, why are we doing this?

>There I agree with you, and I have indeed proposed syntax to do just that
>(though maybe I had overdone it).

I'll admit that my search of the archive was not exhaustive, considering
it is now the end of a very long day here, but I found nothing proposed
that would actually differentiate between a "path-diagnostic" and a 
"path-identity", other than a path-identity cannot have a colon.

I'll also point out that the extremely limited definition of 
path-diagnostic we do have seems to be readily contradicted by every
suggested use I've seen. It is something other than the name of a site,
and yet the main use is to indicate the name of a site -- the "real" name
of the site an article came from.

It would appear that this is all the dregs of the complicated and 
confusing multi-separator system that once graced our pages, which was
very complicated and didn't solve the problem. Now we're at something
simpler, sort of, which still doesn't solve the problem, but does create
them.

If it solves some burning problem, then it needs to be defined and 
differentiable. As it stands, you can't tell a whosits from a whatsits
and thus it can't solve anything.

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:49:09 GMT

>of the site an article came from.

The only concrete use that has been proposed for these "diagnostics" is
for identifying the source site and whether it MATCHed or not. For that
reason, I much prefer the term "source-identity" to "diagnostic".

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