On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:
> From: <jshin@mailaps.org>
>
> > You completely missed the point. Your experiment didn't add any
> > new information about Hotmail's UTF-8 support.
>
> Well, I suppose one can just use the OE support, then? :-)
What's the point of using web-mail service, then?
> > It's almost nothing to do with Hotmail. In this case, it's just OE
> > that does the job well. When viewing your mesg. sent this way on Hotmail
> > web interface, it's MS IE that does the job.
> Well, actually it worked quite well to view the message from the web
> interface -- though that may well be due to IE autodetection.
Didn't I say that already? If auto detection fails, you can
set it to UTF-8 manually.
How much more details should I give you? If the interface lang.
is English, it just leaves alone UTF-8 messages (which results in
*untagged* *standard-violating* email messages) IF your browser
encoding setting is *UTF-8* at the time of composition. However,
if the interface lang. is German, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese
or anything other than English, there's no way to do that(get UTF-8
text through intact). Actually, it's a bit more complex than this.
(if your browser is MS IE, what I wrote is true, but things get broken
differently if your browser is not. However, the bottom line still
holds. Whatever browser you use, you can't use UTF-8 in none of major web
mail services in a *standard-compliant* manner.) It has to do with whether
you can manually overide the encoding of explicitly tagged web pages
in your browser and how html form input is interpreted by your browser.
See <http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/form-i18n.html>.
Hotmail web interface as well as most other web mail services is not
Unicode-ready as I clearly demonstrated in a part of my message you
didn't quote. As a result, their *multilingual* support is at most
primitive. Supprt for one language at a time is fine, but it's not
for anyone (e.g. Ben) who needs to correspond in a language different
from her/his interface language. Simply you cannot correspond in
Japanese/Chinese/Korean in a *standard-compliant-way* while using
English, German, French, etc as the interface language or vice versa.
Using UTF-8 in their web pages (and higher level tagging such as
'lang' attribute in html), they could clearly decouple the interface
language from encoding/charset of email messages. Instead, they use
Shift_JIS for Japanese interface, ISO-8859-x/Windows-125x for European
languages, GB2312 for SC and Big5 for TC, and so forth. Using UTF-8 in
their web pages does not mean that outgoing email messages have to be
in UTF-8 as well. It can be virtually any encoding of user's choice
*regardless* of the interface language. That's not the case of Hotmail,
Yahoo mail and many other web mail services.
Let me quote Otto Stolz's email last July
(http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2001-m07/0268.html)
in which he outlined what's to be done very clearly:
OS> So none of these WWW interfaces is able to handle mail from, or to,
OS> non-Western partners; not even Sorbian, a minority language in our
OS> own country, nor the languages of our neighbours, Polish and Czech,
OS> can be handeled. For a university, this lack of functionality is
OS> plainly intolerable.
OS>
OS> There is a simple solution for this problem:
OS> - encode all forms and other texts of the interface software in Unicode,
OS> once and for all;
OS> - convert incoming mail to unicode;
OS> - talk to the browser in UTF-8;
OS> - accept input from the HTML forms in UTF-8;
OS> - send mail as is (in UTF-8), or convert outgoing mail to suitable 8-bit
OS> (or even 7-bit) encodings, the user should have an option to suggest
OS> the encoding for a particular message or addressee.
OS> But none of the WWW interface packages I have tried works this way.
Just compare what MS Outlook Express and Mozilla can offer you with what
you can do with hotmail(web interface alone, please !), yahoo mail, Lycos
mail, etc. In MS OE and Mozilla, do you have to switch to Japanese(Greek,
Swedish, Vietnamese) UI to compose a Japanese(Greek, Swedish, Vietnamese)
message?
Jungshik Shin
P.S. To hotmail's credit, at least it lets users change language
setting anytime they want. In case of Yahoo-mail and Lycos-mail, it
appears that I have to set up a *new* account to switch the interface
language.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Apr 13 2002 - 10:34:46 EDT