Re: Japanese font on Non-Japanese Android phones

2011/10/8 Andreas Prilop <prilop4321_at_trashmail.net>:
> On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Gerrit wrote:
>
>> So if somebody from Google reads this,
>> [...]
>> Additionally, if the standard Android web browser could then
>> use the html “lang” tag to select the appropriate font,
>> it would be even nicer.
>
> Mark Davis from Google has confessed on this list
> http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2010-m01/0273.html
> that Google deliberately ignores both the LANG attribute of HTML
> and the CHARSET parameter of MIME.
>
> --
> The schoolboys from Google failed again:
> http://groups.google.com/group/fr.test/browse_thread/thread/8ad6f1e8fbfefaec

There's no problem with this strategy if it really helps more users
than it hurts them, because of incorrect settings in the original HTML
or CHARSET parameter of MIME headers coming from the sender. I must
admit that it's now very rare to see messages incorrectly decoded.

But as such autodetection can fail quite often (it is only defined as
an heuristic, not as a definitive algorithm), Gmail is still not
allowing the recipients to change the way the emails have been
autodetected.

If possible, Gmail should allow users to change the result of the
autodetection, and it should also remember this override the next time
the same mail will be viewed again (I see absolutely no reason why
Gmail cannot remember this manual override, given that Gmail can
already add arbitrary leading MIME headers on received messages, it
can as well insert the user choice as a top MIME header kept with the
message in the user mailbox... and could as well learn from the manual
overrides made by a user, to also help feeding the personal
autodetector with user preference data...)

The menu option "Display original" in Gmail is still not convenient
enough, as you cannot work with attachments reliably, notably for
HTML-formatted emails (sent as multipart MIME messages containing
binary base-64 encoded images for example), and it absolutely does not
allow redecoding the message in another way and read it directly
online (for example it won't work on my smartphone where you can't
easily save the message to reedit it immediately or use other tools).
Received on Mon Oct 10 2011 - 22:32:56 CDT