Re: [Nmh-workers] repl and mime handling

[Aleksander Matuszak]

Ken Hornstein writes:

> >*Please, no!* Conversion from any charset to utf-8 is possible, but
> >conversion back, according to user preferences, is not. People
> >start to use funny characters like non-breakable space and so on.
> 
> Unfortunately, we don't have unlimited development resources.
> 
> Here's my reading of the world:
> 
> - The general trend (especially in English-speaking countries) is to move
>   toward Unicode (specifically, UTF-8).

For English-speaking countries UTF-8, in majority, means ASCII,
they can see no difference. As an advantage they can use foreign
names like Moebius in original, this makes message more readable. 
But I'm afraid they wouldn't be happy with message written in
Russian, Chinese or Korean. 


> 
> - People in Eastern Europe aren't crazy about this.

I know, at least, one exception. =:-)


> - Given the lack of unlimited development resources, 
>   I don't really see people
>   willing to change all of the internal APIs to include character set
>   information.  That means we pretty much have to choose one character set
>   for an internal representation inside of nmh.

In fact, I know very little about API, so it might be difficult.
But restrict the entire nmh to utf-8 charset would cripple system.

Beside the information on charset inside API, from my point
of view the correct, and too much resource consumig, is move out
module for conversion outside, as separate program. The default
program would convert to utf-8, but anyone can provide his own
program for conversion according to his taste. Suppose an entry in
.mh_profile mh-text-convert: prog

This (or in similiar way) would also can handle conversion to and
from html, not only charset.

   Max

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