[WikiEN-l] Re: Special characters

Mon Aug 4 04:00:12 UTC 2003

Toby Bartels saith on WikiEN-l:
> Try setting your options for the mailing list
> so that the digest comes with MIME enabled.
> This is off by default in case of broken readers,
> but there's no reason that anybody should leave it off
> if they have a decent mail reader -- like Mozilla.
> Then if an individual message specifies its charset,
> your mail reader will know and won't have to guess.

Brion Vibber also saith (in part) on Wikitech-l:
> ...Change your options to use MIME digests instead of plain text digests...

I /do/ have MIME enabled. I'm not using Mozilla Mail
(the so-called "Thunderbird") but Mozilla Navigator
("Firebird") because I use web-based Yahoo! Mail. In
Y!Mail, the entire digest comes as one HTML file, and
messages with different charsets in one digest confuse
both Y!Mail (as to what charset it should write out)
and Mozilla (as to what charset it should autodetect).

There is no option in Y!Mail not to show e-mails within
other e-mails automatically, and POP access for Y!Mail
costs (too much) money (so I can't use Mozilla Mail).
The main problem is not so much with UTF-8 bytes,
but with ISO Latin-1/ANSI bytes that are invalid in UTF-8
and hence display as white question marks inside
black diamonds. It<?>s hard to read messages with these
symbols. (The 'smart' quote is one of these
invalid characters.)

Isn't there some simple software routine to convert all
incoming messages - or at least the Latin-1/ANSI ones - to
UTF-8?

There was talk a while back about moving to a wiki-like
or bulletin board system instead of using mailing lists;
that would solve this charset problem, and would be a
generally good idea. Are there any plans for that?

-[[User:Geoffrey|Geoffrey Thomas]]

=====
-Geoffrey Thomas
geoffreyerffoeg at yahoo.com

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