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

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

> Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:
>
>> Well, I think, if you want to maximize the chance that your message
>> is flawlessly readable at the other end
>
> That _is_ the raison d'être for MIME after all.

Yes, but I think we'd both agree that the chance is rather small, if I
started to use the MIME compliant coding system ISO 2022 in western
Europe.

IMO Unicode offers the chance to escape the current tower-of-babel
situation as far as character encodings are concerned. I'd like to
compare the current state of affairs with western Europe in
pre-Latin-1 time. I'd like to put it this way:

If you are satisfied with a _fair_ chance to be flawlessly readable
at the other end, you may use UTF-8.

If you want to _maximize_ the chance that you are flawlessly readable
at the other end, but don't want to sacrifice important national
characters, you should follow the rules which Simon pointed out.

If you want to be _sure_ that you are flawlessly readable at the
other end, you should use US-ASCII. In Germany there are at least two
conventions to express umlauts in plain ASCII. I'd guess that similar
conventions exist for other languages.

How long it will take for Unicode to become as widespread in western
Europe as Latin-1 is now -- I don't know. But so far it has spread
very rapidly.

[...]
>> BTW, if the rule were that we should use the smallest, most widely
>> used coded character set which covers the all necessary characters in
>> a message, then western European users should use neither Latin-1 nor
>> Latin-9, but windows-1252.
>
> No, because Windows-1252 isn't a standard, i.e. endorsed by IETF, ISO
> or another reputable standards body.  (IANA registration doesn't make
> it a standard -- anyone can in principle register any old homebrewed
> charset with IANA).

[Aside: Hmm, maybe it could be funny to register emacs-mule ...]

I also prefer standards developed by official standards bodies,
especially such like ISO, CEN (Europe) and DIN (Germany), because they
are at least indirectly under democratic control.

However, there are also things that are de facto standards, because of
their widespread use. Windows-1252, Postscript and the English
language, for example. I am pretty sure that there are more people
around whose MUAs/NUAs can deal with windows-1252 than with Latin-9.

    Oliver
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