From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/53723 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Oliver Scholz Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 19:00:14 +0200 Sender: ding-owner@lists.math.uh.edu Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1060966901 31542 80.91.224.253 (15 Aug 2003 17:01:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 17:01:41 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: ding-owner+M2267@lists.math.uh.edu Fri Aug 15 19:01:39 2003 Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 19nhxL-0005AH-00 for ; Fri, 15 Aug 2003 19:01:39 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.math.uh.edu) by malifon.math.uh.edu with smtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 19nhwI-0001Xs-00; Fri, 15 Aug 2003 12:00:34 -0500 Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com ([64.157.176.121]) by malifon.math.uh.edu with smtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 19nhwE-0001Xn-00 for ding@lists.math.uh.edu; Fri, 15 Aug 2003 12:00:30 -0500 Original-Received: (qmail 53673 invoked by alias); 15 Aug 2003 17:00:30 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 53668 invoked from network); 15 Aug 2003 17:00:30 -0000 Original-Received: from main.gmane.org (80.91.224.249) by sclp3.sclp.com with SMTP; 15 Aug 2003 17:00:30 -0000 Original-Received: from list by main.gmane.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 19nhxL-00073J-00 for ; Fri, 15 Aug 2003 19:01:39 +0200 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ Original-To: ding@gnus.org Original-Received: from sea.gmane.org ([80.91.224.252]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 19nhxK-00073B-00 for ; Fri, 15 Aug 2003 19:01:38 +0200 Original-Received: from news by sea.gmane.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 19nhwC-0008AI-00 for ; Fri, 15 Aug 2003 19:00:28 +0200 Original-Lines: 67 Original-X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org X-Attribution: os X-Face: "HgH2sgK|bfH$;PiOJI6|qUCf.ve<51_Od(%ynHr?=>znn#~#oS>",F%B8&\vus),2AsPYb -n>PgddtGEn}s7kH?7kH{P_~vu?]OvVN^qD(L)>G^gDCl(U9n{:d>'DkilN!_K"eNzjrtI4Ya6;Td% IZGMbJ{lawG+'J>QXPZD&TwWU@^~A}f^zAb[Ru;CT(UA]c& User-Agent: Gnus/5.1002 (Gnus v5.10.2) Emacs/21.3.50 (windows-nt) Cancel-Lock: sha1:D25ocNz3UwOgevO5jkA7n4f7heU= Precedence: bulk Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:53723 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:53723 Simon Josefsson writes: > Xavier Maillard 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!