On 2009-02-10 21:06:55 +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote: > Having iso-8859-1 preferred over UTF-8 was a good choice back in > 2000 when $send_charset was set this way in init.h, since back then > UTF-8 support in MUAs was not always good. > > Now in 2009 that's no longer a problem.
Having iso-8859-1 in $send_charset is not a problem either. > > > And the size advantage in these cases would typically be something > > > around 1%, so not really noticable. > > > > This depends on the language and the length of the message. > > There's much more 1% of accented characters in French text, > > for instance. > > But there are also the characters œ and Œ in French text, They are not characters, but what is called in French "digramme soudé". > and they are not in iso-8859-1. They appear in very rare words, thus in rare messages. Moreover they look very strange in a monospace font (really, two columns should be used for more readability). As there's never an ambiguity (contrary to accented vs non-accented characters), I don't use them anyway. > > So, it can be noticeable. > > "noticeable" if you manually count bytes. > > Even if it was 10% it wouldn't make any difference in practice (emails > are big when someone adds a 1MB attachment, the few bytes in the email > body hardly make any difference you notice in practice). Large mail with *only* text still exists. In this case, this makes a difference. > UTF-8 has the advantages compared to iso-8859-1: > - it can handle all characters in one charset > (iso-8859-1 won't work without the fallback to UTF-8) So what? With the current $send_charset, UTF-8 will be used if the messages contains characters outside iso-8859-1. > - it has already become more or less the standard charset > under Linux Not just under Linux. But the point is that MUA's can handle iso-8859-1. So, there's nothing wrong in using it. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
