Path: utzoo!utstat!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <48887@looking.on.ca>
Date: 17 Nov 89 06:55:08 GMT
References: <47326@looking.on.ca> <1989Nov14.195710.11774@NCoast.ORG>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 31
Class: discussion

In article <1989Nov14.195710.11774@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>Note that this now incorporates the "% interp buffer overflow" hack of
>including only the previous article in the References: line.  Also note that
>I have removed the Reply-To: line, which is redundant, unnecessary, and
>requires a hard-coded domain (ugh).


ACK!!!  STOP!!!!

Please don't only include the parent article in the references line!  If you
must trim it down, then include at the very least the 'root' article and
the parent.   I think there was a move afoot to modify the RFC to say that.

If we are ever going to get software the makes use of the references line
(I've been experimenting with some tonight, and the results are beautiful --
I never knew USENET could be so clear and easy to deal with when displayed
as a graphical tree) then we should at least preserve the root.  Otherwise
the software has to work a lot harder.

But the beauty of that tree is tainted by all the subthreads that get zoomed
to the top because of broken references lines.   It could be soooo good.

What this means is that a references-using reader either has to
	a) do a lot of hairy, time consuming things to re-link broken lines, or
	b) work only with a inews program that does the hairy things.

The latter is clearly more efficient, but requiring people to change their
inews just to run a new reader is more painful.
	 
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473