On 15/07/05, Skyring skyring@gmail.com wrote:
It depends if you are talking about using it for viewing threads, which is what I was doing, or discussing compatibility with other browsers, which is what you two are doing!
At risk of being pedantic, the distinction is more between the way it *presents* threads (very well) and the way it *defines* them (rather badly).
I really like GMail's interface for dealing with conversations, and it's a bold step away from the traditional tree-view. However, for some reason best known to its designers, it ignores the standard [and, I believe, Standardised] way of defining a thread (the headers in each message which indicate its relationship to others) and uses completely idiosyncratic heuristics instead.
As an example of why this method is actually *worse* (rather than just different), note that I had to search for the beginning of this thread, because someone had changed the subject and GMail could not connect the two parts. There may be counter-examples where it handles certain situations *better*, but it seems to me that they'd have done better building *on top of* long-established conventions, rather than ignoring them.
For me, GMail is "quite good" at threads right now, but would be "very good" if it used in-reply-to etc as at least a factor in its grouping.
I can't do anything about the second, and on that score perhaps you'd like to redirect grumbles to Google.
This, of course, is absolutely true, and I hope no-one is too annoyed at the off-topic-ness of this thread.