On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, cbrown@xnetinc.com wrote:
> Jungshik,
>
>> What makes me annoyed is that programs like Eudora lie about
>> MIME charset (i.e. it declares it's sending out ISO 8859-1 while it
>> actually sends out Windows-1252).
>
> I have no problem sending it our with a " Windows-1252" character
> set. If you convert to iso-8859-1 you lose characters that is just
> as bad as sending Windows-1252 out as iso-8859-1.
No. Conversion to ISO-8859-1 is better, since the result is actually
a valid, meaningful message that reasonable mail clients can interpret
and display correctly without difficulties. On the other hand, a
program can not attach a meaningful value to cp1252 charactes in a
(allegdly) ISO-8859-1 message without making guesses. For the most
part, replacing stuff like dumbquotes with normal quotes and
<ellipsis> with "..." is not nearly as bad as having to replace CJK
ideograms with question marks etc.
> The problem is that many browsers do not yet support iso-8859-1
You're kidding, right? Or perhaps you meant -15 ?
> and the systems do not have iso-8859-15 fonts.
That's going to change, and soon. From 2002-1-1 the Euro will replace
national currencies _completely_ in most EU countries, and an OS that
can not display the Euro symbol correctly will not be very useful
anymore. IIRC Euro (i.e. ISO-8859-1) support will be mandated by the
EU in one form or another (i.e. governmental agencies will not be
allowed to use software that does not support the Euro sign and so
on.)
But off course, that's orthogonal to the issue at hand anyway. After
all, if you use a Euro sign in your message then the recipient will
have problems if he or she does not have a font with the necessary
glyph installed no matter what you do. It does not matter what
charset you're using, unless of course you're using a display system
which is too stupid to remap font encodings on the fly.
A reasonable thing to do in such circumstances is to send ISO-8859-1
by default, and only use ISO-8859-15 if you're actually using
characters not found in ISO-8859-1.
-- Gaute Strokkenes http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~gs234/ Intra-mural sports results are filtering through th' plumbing...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 13 2001 - 21:12:15 EDT