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

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:
[...]
>> My question is more a question of compliance with other MUAs.
>> Would you recommend your users to use utf-8 as a default encoding
>> system ? AFAIK, I can't see many MUAs aware of it and worst almost
>> nobody is using utf-8 which was presented as the future. So what is the
>> problem with utf in general that prevent users in general to use it
>> defaultly ?

I have been using UTF-8 as a default in Mails&News for over a year
now. It is sometimes problematic, but even if the MUA on the other end
does not cope with UTF-8 it never makes my (western european) text
entirely unreadable.

Sure, that is still not nice. But like Frank I see it as an
chicken-and-egg problem: I decided once that I was going to promote
UTF-8 by using it. I realized then that virtually none of my
non-technical-oriented friends had any problems with UTF-8, since
they use programs like Outlook, Mozilla or some obscure Macintosh
MUA, whose name I have forgot. The only major group of people who
have problems with UTF-8 are computer-literates. This seems weird to
me. I wouldn't use UTF-8 if it were the other way around.

I don't think that this sort of UTF-8 radicalism is the right thing
for everyone. Simon's suggestions demonstrate nicely the
tower-of-babel situation resulting from the current flood of coding
systems, but I have to admit that they also indicate the most sensible
way to deal with those things, if you want to maximize the chance that
your text is flawlessly readable at the other end.

But I do think that *some* people should start to use UTF-8 as a
default.

[...]
> And if a european user write € it should use iso-8859-15.  (One could
> argue that iso-8859-15 is too recent and that it may make sense to go
> directly to UTF-8, but my experience, as a northern european user, is
> that iso-8859-15 is more appropriate, since the almost-compatibility
> with iso-8859-1 is friendlier for people with old software.)

This seems to make sense. But how good is it working in your
experience? I seems possible to me that a non-Latin-9-aware MUA/NUA
could try to display a message with an iso8859-15 charset header as
ascii, so that not even Latin-1-compatible chars would be displayed
correctly. Does that happen with some MUAs?

However, I tend to think that it's better to write EUR instead of €,
if you want to avoid UTF-8.

[...]
> Perhaps some day we can try ASCII first, then fall back to UTF-8.  But
> that will take a long time.  Even moving to ISO-8859-1 in northern
> Europe took a long time, and still isn't finished.  I still use IBMPC2
> (CP437?) in some regional communication channels.
[...]

I think it is in general a good idea to choose the encoding according
to the audience. Fortunately this is not hard with Gnus. There are
some people to which I send my mail in Latin-1.


    Oliver
-- 
28 Thermidor an 211 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!