Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: References line (RFC1036)
Message-ID: <3236@looking.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 89 17:09:22 GMT
References: <59.24690105@jsheese.FIDONET.ORG>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 30

No, the References: line is not required in an article -- for one reason
original 'root' articles aren't supposed to have it.

All I am pointing out is the non-obvious fact that once you write software
to deal with the References line, you find out that it is all or nothing,
like the 'great renaming'.   If 5% of sites refused to do the great renaming,
then they would have either had to leave the net or the great renaming would
not have worked.

The same is true with References -- Almost all sites have to put out
References or References will not work.  I am not saying it is utterly
crucial that References work, but I do think it is a good idea, and I
think that most people also feel this way.  We have been supporting it for
5 years to no end and it still can't be used to kill a chain of articles.

Almost nothing on usenet is required other than agreement on an article
format.  In fact, in many ways the definition of Usenet is 'sites that
use the following article format.'   By and large what people do on
their own sites is their own business -- the one exception is this format.
It's the only thing that we have to agree to as a group -- even the newsgroup
list (which we've argued so much about) doesn't *have* to be done that way.

There is no rule, for example, against setting up a gateway so that every
message is entitled "Bitnet mail follows," to give an example from the
past.  But it really ticks people off, and shows up in kill files.

In general, the decision of what to read should be up to the reader, but
to do this by software, the articles must be well and correctly classified.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473