Jens Siebert <jes@stardivision.de> wrote:
> However, because of the tremendous amount of mails
> I would like to suggest splitting the list into
> various lists, divided by main-topics.
>
> These could be sorted by „groups of languages“,
> such as CJK(+V) and other groups.
> Another sector could be „technical issues“, such
> as encoding-related mails, statements about
> programm-code source-samples etc. !
I cannot speak for the list adminstrators, but I am on about four
mailing lists, and almost every list gets a request like this from time
to time. It seems at first glance to be a worthy goal.
The problem is that topics and people naturally stray, and what starts
as a discussion about one Unicode-related topic ends up being about a
totally different one, or even something completely unrelated to
Unicode. Recently a discussion about how Japanese furigana should be
encoded in Unicode mutated into a discussion about the history of
control codes. This is called "topic drift," and it is not necessarily
bad, but it is usually difficult to control and would be much more so
if there were separate lists for CJK issues, Arabic issues, font issues,
technology (fonts/browsers/terminals), etc.
There is already a separate list called "unicore" where members discuss
proposals for new characters and scripts and other nuts-and-bolts
issues. (BTW, how can I join that list? Is it for Unicode members
only?)
> I put this idea here, because personally I only
> read unicode-list-mails related to CJK and technical
> issues. I believe many of you may face the same
> problem, and would like to receive only certain mails
> related to specialized topics.
The best solution is to scan the "Subject" line of messages and to use
your "delete" button on messages you don't care about. I know this
sounds flippant every time someone says it, but experience shows it is
really the best way. We can help by changing the "Subject" line of a
thread to reflect that the underlying topic has changed.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:05 EDT