Re: Comments on draft-resnick-2822upd-02.txt

In <[email protected]> Alan Barrett <[email protected]> writes:

>Perhaps it would make sense to strengthen the idea that "Re:" is a fixed
>string not to be translated into other languages (I see "AW:" more often
>than any other attempted translation), and that things like "Re: re:" or
>"Re^2:" or "Re: AW: Re:"  should be avoided.  I seem to recall that
>USEFOR came up with some reasonable wording for this, but I can't find
>it now.

The wording at one time in USEFOR was:

   Followup agents MAY remove strings that are known to be used
   erroneously as back-reference (such as "Re(2): ", "Re:", "RE: ", or
   "Sv: ") from the Subject-content when composing the subject of a
   followup, and add a correct back-reference in front of the result.

        NOTE: that would be "SHOULD remove instances" except that we
        cannot find a sufficiently robust and simple algorithm to do the
        necessary natural language processing.

   Followup agents MUST NOT use any other string except "Re: " as a back
   reference. Specifically, a translation of "Re: " into a local
   language or usage MUST NOT be used.

        NOTE: "Re" is an abbreviation for the Latin "In re", meaning "in
        the matter of", and not an abbreviation of "Reference" as is
        sometimes erroneously supposed.

That is not in the present syntactic and semantic drafts, but there is an
intention for a third BCP draft (working title USEAGE) and similar wording
(and much more) appears in the current USEAGE draft. But what will go in
the final USEAGE draft remains to be seen.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email protected]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5