RE: Eudora (was: Is there Unicode mail out there?)

From: Carl W. Brown (cbrown@xnetinc.com)
Date: Fri Jul 13 2001 - 11:18:04 EDT


Junshik,

> and I'm sick and tired
> of receiving Windows-1252 messages *mislabelled* as ISO 8859-1 with
> proprietary extension characters that are not supposed to be sent along
> the wire in messages labelled as ISO 8859-1.

Just wait until 1/1/2002 when many people will be caught napping and the
Euro takes affect. iso-8859-1 will be obsolete and windows-1252 (revised
code page with the same name) and iso-8859-15 will be the proper code pages
to display the Euro sign (At different code points of course).

> Mac version of Eudora is better than MS-Windows
> version, but even MacOS version is far behind other mail clients like
> Mozilla/Netscape6/Netscap 4.x and MS OE in terms of I18N.

Last year I worked on a project where we gave up sending UTF-8 HTML code
pages because Netscape 4.7 did not properly support UTF-8 and Netscape 6.0
was not out. This was a Korean web site and Netscape 4.7 could not handle
Korean UTF-8.

UTF-8 support in Netscape was a hack. It took rewriting NS to support
Unicode natively to get decent UTF-8 support. UTF-8 pages can be
multi-lingual. To try to support UTF-8 pages with a code page based product
is borderline insane. To make it work you should use Unicoded encoded fonts
and therefore must write test in Unicode. You must have script detection to
determine font selection. This is why NS had to be rewritten and IE which
was Unicode to begin with, handle UTF-8 and many others don't.

However, the way that the web is moving most other web software providers
will have to deal with the problem of having to convert to Unicode support
to stay alive.

Carl



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