GMail's threading (was Re: [WikiEN-l] A plea)

Fri Jul 15 20:20:46 UTC 2005

On 15/07/05, Skyring <skyring at 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.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]