Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs

[Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com>]

Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> But the purpose of email is to _communicate_.  Why lower you chance
>> of cummunicating if there is no compelling technical reason to do
>> so?
>
> Now and then I realize in German Usenet, that a few people who post
> replies to my articles can not deal with UTF-8, because when they
> quote the text I wrote, I see funny characters instead of umlauts.
> This is not a big impediment to communication.

It is a big impediment, believe me.  A long time ago I used read
Usenet by TELNETTing from a Norsk Data terminal to an overloaded
Ultrix box.  Needless to say this setup could not display any 8bit
characters (the eight bit was stripped).  Reading Danish was so
annoying that I didn't use dk.* for many years.

Also remember that not everyone can say "Okay, I'll just upgrade to
something Unicode-capable".  If you're using a shared system you
probably don't have the power to decide that.

> If we don't move to Unicode in the future then coding system
> problems will go on forever and ever.

It would be foolish not to use Unicode for any _new_ protocols or
formats.  But for legacy systems like email and Usenet backward
compatibility is really, really important.  If you look at how
e.g. MIME or format=flowed was designed, you'll see that a lot of
effort and thought was spent on minimizing negative effects for
existing clients.

You need an especially good excuse to break existing stuff.  The fact
that Unicode is a technically more pleasing solution just isn't a good
enough reason to break things unnecessarily, IMHO.

But if you're doing something that wasn't possible before, say, using
German and Thai in the same message, that's a valid reason to use
Unicode.

> My guess -- by the way -- is that Unicode will become increasingly
> important in Europe, especially for the members of the EU. We'd need
> at least Latin-1/Latin-9, Latin-2 and Greek (ISO 8859-7). And I am not
> sure if that already covers Latvian, Romanian and others. There will
> be a growing need for an encoding that covers all of these languages.

I think most Western European users don't care about and don't know
how to access any glyph that isn't printed on the keyboard.

>> 2. Unicode support itself doesn't really buy me a lot if most people
>>    don't have fairly complete Unicode fonts (which they don't).
>
> So the worst thing that could happen is that they see a hollow box now
> and then.

An empty box can be bad enough.  If you're writing an equation it can
be really important what that empty box happens to be ☺ I experienced
that problem recently when I used ℏ in a message.

> And yet some characters are more frequent than others. You can
> probably rely on the fact that western Europeans have fonts that
> contain the Latin-1 repertoire. Box drawing characters or symbols
> may not be that frequent, but there is a good chance to get the
> additional punctuation characters.

In practice the only thing you can reasonably expect are the 650
glyphs in WGL4.¹


¹ http://partners.adobe.com/asn/tech/type/opentype/appendices/wgl4.jsp