how about the idea of merging some version control mechanisms into the
mail readers, such as performing the automatic diff, automatic labelling?
but this will violate the rule of easy_to_use.
shannon
-------
I think that having the MIME-Version be lexicographically ordered is
cute, but too much at odds with the way people use version labels. At
the risk of generalizing from my own prejudices, I expect people to
issue version numbers in increasing numeric order, but to consider
version label strings to be arbitrary in ordering.
The only time I ever gave a version label that was alphabetically
related to a previous version was when I had ordered the files in a
directory so someone listing the directory would see:
Version
file
has
moved.
Requiring the relationship to be monotonically increasing
lexicographically will conflict with people's intuition: Labels are
meaningful strings to remember something about the system. Numbers are
a sequence of versions of the system.
Sorry Nathaniel, but I couldn't let you get too clever without saying
something.
-Bill Cattey
MIT Information Systems