Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
A few messages back (on WikiEN-l) I sent some accented
characters that are found in Unicode/UTF-n but not in Latin-1
using Yahoo! Mail. These apparently appeared on Timwi's client
as HTML entities, but on my client they displayed properly.
Is this just a bug with Y!Mail?
Most other special characters cannot be easily displayed
in my browser. I get the digested form, and some messages
use different character sets than others - and Mozilla
autoguesses the character set as a third, in most cases.
In one digest with links to the Hindi Wikipedia and a UTF-8
apostrophe, the default character set was Chinese Simplified.
Links should always be given in the encoded form, eg:
http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%96%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_…
rather than raw:
http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/मुख्य_पृष्ठ
The downside is that the links are ugly, illegible, and can get very
long when dealing with non-latin writing systems (6 or 9 URL-encoded
bytes per Unicode character). The upside is that they are pure ASCII and
(modulo line break issues) will work transparently.
In most browsers, the encoded form will be shown in the URL bar and
cut-n-pasted via eg right-click-copy-this-link.
Is there something the software can do about this? We
can't
assume everyone'll send in UTF-8 (which would have been nice),
and for those like me who receive digests, it's impossible to
get the browser to display two character sets on the same
page. Could the digesting software automatically convert all
e-mails to the same character set, preferably UTF-8?
Go to the list page, eg:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
and put your address in under "edit options" down at the bottom.
Change your options to use MIME digests instead of plain text digests:
this should make the messages individual attachments instead of dumping
everything in one text chunk, and is more likely to not break things
like encodings and messages with their own attachments. Of course, I
don't know if your mail client will work with that...
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)