[Wikipedia-l] Re: html emails

Tue Apr 19 00:52:02 UTC 2005

Chad Perrin a écrit:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 12:45:54AM +0100, Cormac Lawler wrote:
> 
>>On 4/18/05, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 09:41:58PM +0200, Anthere wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>When I say the majority, I was referring to those discussing the topic
>>>>on quarto list. Cormac, could you sent a sample of the last version of
>>>>the mail so that Chad can understand what I mean by "best to use html" ?
>>>>
>>>
>>>Is the group of people discussing it on the quarto list the sum total of
>>>people who will receive this email of which you speak?
>>>
>>
>>The email is proposed to be distributed on the newly-created
>>foundation-news-l mailing list, specifically set up for this purpose
>>(and possibly other announcements though this hasn't been fully
>>discussed). We've also thought about using it as a multilingual press
>>release.
>>
>>On multilinguality, is it any easier to display a multilingual message
>>in a plain text email? Or does this require the html solution? (This
>>is why html was proposed in the first place.)
>>
> 
> 
> short answer: Yes.
> 
> slightly longer answer:  The language for which a given computer is set
> up is the language in which that computer is going to be most easily
> able to render text.  Thus, if you happen to be using an Arabic-language
> version of a given OS, it will display text as Arabic where that is the
> language in which the text is sent.  Unicode, after all, wasn't just
> designed for the Web.
> 
> Now, granted, there are some languages that might suffer limitations in
> this area, but they'll tend to suffer the same limitations with
> displaying text in HTML as well.  After all, text is text: text in HTML
> uses the same mechanism as text outside of HTML, unless the text is
> actually rendered as a static image, which is another ball of wax
> entirely.
> 
> --
> Chad Perrin
> [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

This has already been discussed in length for the main page of Wikipedia.
Displaying a certain content of text due to the language of the browser 
is not a good solution. It is not a solution that we direct readers to a 
*certain* type of quarto version depending on their browser settings.

Have you a solution for this ?

ant