Re: email headers (was Re: ACTION 07)

Jim, 
thanks for this suggestion, I fully agree with you (and I am guilty of
"issue 5") that meaningful and to-the-point subject header is very
useful.

When one uses identifiers in subject (like action 7 or issue 5) then one
should make sure that the identifier is a stable one. For issues, our
policy is that issues will keep their unique numbers and that they will
be available for all the WG lifetime; however we don't give stable and
unique numbers to action items because they are meant as transient
records, therefore please refrain from using whatever number the
RRSAgent happens to assign to an action in a particular IRC session. 8-)

I for one will try to keep this in mind, 8-)

Jacek

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 12:04 -0400, Jim Hendler wrote:
> May I make a suggestion to everyone based on having chaired a WG in 
> the past?  It is important that the email from this group be archived 
> and that both the folks here, and also outsiders, can find things via 
> a combination of search and thread heading.  For example, some point 
> in the future someone will need to document the answer to some Last 
> Call comment by pointing to some email message where the group argued 
> some issue.  A year or so from now it may be very hard to remember 
> what "Action 07" or "issue 5" referred to.  It also makes it hard for 
> those who are trying to monitor the mail, but not reading every 
> message to have a clue as to what the messages are about.
>   A good WG practice is to use subjects that include some "semantic" 
> content (at least in a human readable sense) and to do what I did in 
> the subject line above when you rename an existing thread.  Something 
> like "issue 5 - annotation context" will make things much easier in 
> the future
>   Sorry to jump in, but for those of us in the 1,000 email a week 
> range little things like this make a big difference
>   -Jim H
>

Received on Monday, 5 June 2006 15:36:58 UTC