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Re: [Nmh-workers] repl and mime handling


From: Aleksander Matuszak
Subject: Re: [Nmh-workers] repl and mime handling
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:36:03 +0100

Ralph Corderoy writes:

> Hi Aleksander,
> 
> > For English-speaking countries UTF-8, in majority, means ASCII, they
> > can see no difference.
> 
> I don't think that's the case.  Even North Americans, who have $ in
> ASCII, still find ` ' " " and ... cropping up, especially when services
> automatically convert ` ' " " and ....  And then there's L and Euro.

Well, for some people/software it is funny to use LEFT SINGLE
QUOTATION MARK instead '. But some converters are clever. Mine
treat it correctly and it took me some time to find what you
are writing about.

> 
> > 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. 
> 
> The UTF-8 fonts on systems like Linux, and I assume Windows and Mac too,
> handle these just fine;  Cyrillic, Chinese, and Japanese spam turns up
> here daily and mhshow copes.
> 

Do not confuse message perfectly displayed and message perfectly
readable.

> > But restrict the entire nmh to utf-8 charset would cripple system.
> 
> What language/charset/locale is it that you have where UTF-8 causes
> problems?

My mental system.  Try some test. Take the file with code (any
programming language), replace all normal characters like
space, '"- etc. with their funny equivalents from utf-8. Send
this file to the programmer who works in utf-8 environment. Measure
the time until he find the reason for problems.

I do not want discuss the (dis)advantages of this or that. There
are people, who do not want work with utf-8, for better or worse
reasons. No software should enforce them to this.

Cheers, Max

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