RE: 8859-1, 8859-15, 1252 and Euro (bis)

From: Alain LaBonté  (alb@sct.gouv.qc.ca)
Date: Wed Feb 09 2000 - 13:53:57 EST


À 09:53 2000-02-09 -0800, Michael Everson a écrit:
>Ar 08:52 -0800 2000-02-09, scríobh Alain:
>
> >Turn off 7-bit fake-8-bit-encoding on output. Called QP in Eudora,
> >differently in Outlook, I believe. I give this advice to all my
> >correspondents and they are always better off. They thank me so much !
>
>I don't. I curse you for it. (-:

[Alain] I know, I have to play the exorcist every night before I go to
bed.... (%=

But as you are Buddhist, the Catholic recipe does not work, so I plan to
convert just to grab the Buddhist exorcism recipe. (Anyway I don't practice
any religion, it is a pity that I have to practice exorcism just for
you)... (^; [friends like to kid each other !]

[Michael]
>MIME works well, and is reliable, and when
>I don't use it, it is always bad. So I use it, and when you write to me,
>your name is garbled.

[Alain] You confuse two things here. MIME and 7-bit/8-bit.

MIME is a tagging system. 8-bit can be MIME-tagged and decoded/recoded
properly in a given environment as well as Quoted-Punreadable (tiens, je
viens de l'inventer, celle-là !). Now for the headers that is another
story. I proposed a solution to the problem you have and which because of
this affects me, but if email client developers don't want to solve it that
is another story. Already the Pegasus author at least listened to me and
did something although not well known -- not a panacea, but a step forward).

Alain

PS: I once proposed that the character set coding assumed in the headers be
the same as the first MIME-character-set declaration in the email flow,
given that most email clients read the whole message before displaying it.
I would now add that UTF-8 being the Internet trend for the default
character set (fine with me, I am all in favour of democracy), that if
UTF-8 is not recognized at once (I think it can be recognized pretty well),
it would be improved if the method I expose above is implemented in
addition. Mac/PC/Unix communications, in particular, would greatly be
improved, at least in French/Finnish/West European/Panamerican
environments, but my proposal has the advantage to apply to the world
character sets locally as well. But as I am not religious, I won't start a
religion, I am against credos, I am anti-dogmatic (I just beleive that the
universe itself is intelligent, sometimes stupid, but it [I.T. seems a
dissident angel which believes himself to be a stronger gorilla because it
uses capital letters] tries to cure itself constantly). I just proposed
this in a constructive way. Destroyers, « à l'œuvre ! ». Destroy my
proposal, it is in the records anyway. I said it. Take it or leave it. We
will all die anyway... Of this or something else does not matter...

¤^8=



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