Subject: [Ltru] Re: weights in scored filtering

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:20:50 -0800

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand dot no> wrote:

> If an item in the list does not have a q value, its q value is assumed 
> to
> be 0.75 times the q value of the preceding item in the list.
> If the first item in the list does not have a q value, its q value is
> assumed to be 1.
>
> So the two lists
>
>  en;q=1.0, fr;q=0.75, de
>
>  en, fr, de;q=0.5625
>
> would be completely identical.
> That at least gives us a consistent, and mostly intuitive, 
> interpretation
> of such lists.

Yuck.  Isn't there some way we can promote a mutually useful matching 
strategy without hard-coding these values into the RFC?

0.5625 may make mathematical sense, but I don't think it's a very 
intuitive value for humans to understand how matching is supposed to 
work.  I had a hard enough time with the values {256, 128, 32, 4, 1} 
embedded in the description of scored filtering (any such sequence with 
a steeper slope than a decreasing Fibonacci sequence would have served 
the purpose equally well).

I know the matching draft isn't expected to describe current practice, 
and I know we can't go back to the days when it was just a set of 
suggestions for implementers.  I do think these concrete values are a 
rather long stride in the opposite direction.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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