From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>
To: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@mozilla.org>
Cc: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: In-Reply-To 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:54:17 -0800."
             <3649F979.6AF60822@mozilla.org> 
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Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:30:38 +1100
Message-Id: <12264.910873838@munnari.OZ.AU>
Sender: kre@munnari.oz.au

    Date:        Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:54:17 -0800
    From:        Jamie Zawinski <jwz@mozilla.org>
    Message-ID:  <3649F979.6AF60822@mozilla.org>

  | That's all well and good, but I don't think it's an answer to my
  | question.  What would be your new specification of the References
  | header?

The message-ids in the message header ought simply be any messages
that are referenced (explicitly or implicitly) by this message.
No other constraints at all (well maybe one, I will come to later).

UA's have to deal with two aspects of this - generating it (since we
certainly don't expect users to go typing in message-ids), and using it
when displaying a message.

Generation ought to be simple - You start with the references headers of
any messages which are being replied to, take the union of those as sets,
append the message-ids of those messages themselves, and then if quotes or
extracts are taken from any other identifiable messages, also append those.

For display there are many options, one is simply to provide a list of
referenced messages (as a menu or whatever) and allow the user to display
any of them explicitly.  Or messages can be grouped and displayed using the
references list, usually in conjunction with the Subject, as a DAG.   That's
where we want the one restriction on the message-ids in the references list,
to keep the thing a DAG, the references should only be to messages that have
previously been sent (by someone) - that is, no sticking in a reference to a
message that you (or someone else) plans on sending sometime in the future.

kre