At 10:07 27/10/04 -0400, Bruce Lilly wrote:
> Or a least, if a message is going to point to an
> archive of itself, it should be a faithful archive.
That raises several new issues with Martin's draft. They can be
summarized as "what is the utility of the proposed field; who
will use it, under what circumstances, and for what purpose(s)?".
Note that that is not a question about syntax, or about semantics,
or about validity, but about utility.
Utility? That's easy! The system described by Martin's draft is extremely
useful. It is implemented by the w3.org mailing list systems, and in my
work using those mailing lists I've made frequent and much-appreciated use
of the feature.
I find it faintly ironic that one of the best (as in most usable and most
useful) mailing list services I've used anywhere on the Internet is run by
the World Wide *Web* Consortium. The archive system is a major factor in
that usability. Mail archives really take on additional value when they
become a fully linked and cross-linked part of the Web. For this to really
work well --as it does-- the messages really need to be served using a
hypertext format, such as HTML. I've no objection if others would like to
design and build systems that serve messages using whatever format they
like, but to claim that the HTML-served messages are in some sense not
useful or non-functional is to ignore the daily experience of the many
people who use them.
#g
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Graham Klyne
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