At 06:14 PM 6/28/2002 -0400, Tex Texin wrote:
>Instead we should ask the vendors why they default to these code pages
>for WRITING web pages.
That's a good question. I had the opportunity to discuss the issue of default encodings in detail with several major Japanese system integrators a few years ago wrt email instead of web pages. The results might be enlightening.
Japanese simply believe that email must ( *must* MUST *MUST* did I mention MUST) be 7 bit in order to have any chance to go through to the recipient, despite being presented with an inbox full of SJIS email.
This is ingrained in the culture at the level of a folk tale. Because it was admittedly once true (before half of Japan was even born), it is still believed to be true. It is probably the first thing that every Japanese young or old learns about email, and it is carved in stone. It is the Japanese nature to not shake things up, and if someone tells a newbie to do email a certain way, it will be done that way forever.
No set of technical tests, including on these SI's own brand machines no matter how obscure the functionality (all sorts of wapuros) could turn up an example that could not receive properly encoded 8bit MIME encoded SJIS mail.
Despite that, the true objection, which was ultimately strong enough to force us to make Japanese a special case and use ISO-2022-JP, basically came down to "because if we don't all our customers will think the product is broken even if it displays and sends email perfectly well".
The mere fact that an email arrives with headers indicating the body is encoded in SHIFT-JIS is proof enough to the average (I am not talking about tech savvy, I mean someone's grandmother!) Japanese email user. If they can read it and reply to it, but a header filter indicates SJIS, then it might as well be spam.
Much as I would like to, based on that experience, I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of propaganda campaign it would take to get Japanese to use Unicode as the default for anything.
Barry Caplan
www.i18n.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jun 28 2002 - 21:42:44 EDT