On Wednesday 23 April 2003 8:59 pm, James Mohr wrote:
I disagree there. First, I would consider a decade or so of use to be "sufficiently mature". There *are* applications (i.e. mail readers the implement this feature and the fact that some applications do not take advantage of this feature does not mean the feature is not standardized. Should we all ingore HTML standards on our web pages simply because they are not implemented by Microsoft?
Well, if it ain't written down, it ain't a standard, regardless of the length of 'use', its age or even its shoe size. And what Christopher Mahmood says about ezmlm-idx indicates that there are multiple implementations trying to achieve the same end. As for HTML standards, I think that just makes my point. What we should do is ignore Microsoft practice [what they do is practice _not_ standards] and use w3c standards. Only if we are feeling kind, we should then detect MSIE and code specially for its limitations, but otherwise we should expect Microsoft to mend their browser. Similarly with threading. If there was a _published_ standard [with broad agreement and enough wrinkles ironed out to be broadly beneficial], I would want a client to support that standard. I would want SuSE to provide clients which complied [presuming on the broadness of SuSE's shoulders!]
Also there **is** support for threading on the client end. My email reader (Kmail) **does** support it. I can group my email messages by thread, as well as collapse or expand those threads. When I click "reply" or some variant, my email client rightly assumes that this is a continuation of the same conversation. If not, I click "Post to mailing-list" and it creats a brand new message which is independant of the orignal thread. I am certain that many of the email clients other people use have similar features. Just because they are not labled 'reply to current thread' and 'reply to new thread' does not negate them. In fact, in my mind having different labels confirms the "rightness" of them. You *reply* to the *same* thread, you *post* a *new* thread.
Your explanation makes total sense - once you know the bit about how messages are associated with threads. However, the problem remains that to most people 'thread' and 'subject' are the same thing and even in Kmail, 'thread' is not obvious as a message attribute in any sense other than the subject [particularly when you initiate the process of composing a message]. Solve that problem and I think that the instantiation of hijacked threads would halve and when the issue is pointed out in the remaining cases, people would be far more inclined to comply, purely through comprehension. This would only leave thread drift, which would be subjective, although godwinating a thread would always cross the line...
Vince, if it were obvious then I wouldn't have needed to point it out. Since many people do not use threaded readers they obviously do not *see* the benefits of threaded messages. That's why I pointed it out and explained what it means (and I really don't see how my post was "barking").
That's [guard dog] barking not barking [mad]. No, that's my perception of reactions to thread hijacking in general [through the ages], rather than of you. I think this has taken us somewhere constructive. regards Vince Littler