From: "Robert Comer" 

> It isn't a useful 'enhancement' in the general case.

I think you'd be surprised how many times this gets asked in the support
sites -- it's far from a unique request you seem to think.

>There's no warranty that all those servers will have synchronised time. So
>you'd end up with the same problem as now.

No, I wouldn't -- true I can't trust them enough to say they will have the
absolute correct time all the time, but it would cut down time issues in
email and news by at least 99%.

> What you really want is a more intelligent display mode, that uses the
> time except when contradicted by the 'references' field. Or some way of
> easily controlling the date of the first message to display, so you can
> preserve the tree structure and simply adjust its root.

That would be good, but I don't think it would be all that easy to implement.

It just fixes a symptom though, rather than the underlying cause.  I really
think the news (ad email) specs were written for another day on controlled
systems, but for the masses, and it's time we update them.  This kind of
change could be implemented only on the servers (and easily at that),
clients don't even need to know there was a change. And if you really want
to make sure it's the correct time, have the server syncing the clock with
one of the timekeeper systems -- auto set, auto timezone -- very doable for
a server.

- Bob Comer



"Paul Ranson"  wrote in message
news:41910357{at}w3.nls.net...
> It isn't a useful 'enhancement' in the general case. You can post on
> multiple servers that then exchange updates between themselves. There's no
> warranty that all those servers will have synchronised time. So you'd end
> up with the same problem as now.
>
> What you really want is a more intelligent display mode, that uses the
> time except when contradicted by the 'references' field. Or some way of
> easily controlling the date of the first message to display, so you can
> preserve the tree structure and simply adjust its root.
>
> Paul
>
> "Robert Comer" 
wrote in message
> news:4190f73a{at}w3.nls.net...
>> >I think you're expecting to use the date attribute on the message for
>> >something it wasn't intended for.
>>
>> So asking for an enhancement like that is ridiculous?  If so we'd still
>> be using DOS on computers and wouldn't have the www.
>>
>> - Bob Comer
>
>

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