Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!anise.ac!ivucsb!news
From: news@ivucsb.UUCP (Todd Day)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Huge reference lines
Message-ID: <785@ivucsb.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 89 18:56:26 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <649@marob.MASA.COM> <3231@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: news@ivucsb.UUCP (Todd Day)
Organization: The Audio Club at UCSB, Isla Vista, California
Lines: 25

In article <3231@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
~We will have to rely forever on Subject lines, leaving us forever with the
~curse of completely meaningless subject lines.   Ideally, the References
~line should do all the work.   Each article should have a different subject
~that says what that article is actually about.

One thing I could never figure out about the References line is why it
keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.  Look at the references in
the header above...  Why doesn't it just point back to <3231@looking.UUCP>
since that is what I'm replying to?  <3231> should point to <649@marob>,
which should point to <3222@looking>.  The way things now stand is like
creating a linked list where everything at the end of the list points
back to each of the previous articles.  This is just plain silly, and
results in huge Reference lines that occaisionally core dump rn.

If the references only refered to the previous article, someone could write
software to construct linked lists as the news articles come in, much
like the history file.  Then it would be easy to write hypertext soft-
ware like Brad is trying to do, plus we wouldn't be wasting all that
space.  Just a thought.

-- 
-Todd Day-

ivucsb!todd@anise.acc.com