Thunderbird sees fit to warn me before I send something that contains UTF-8
characters. I guess something I cut & pasted into my signature file has some
of them new fangled "smart quotes" or whatever. It presents me with this big
dialog box telling me all the consequences of using Unicode or se[1]nding
Unicode in the current character set (without telling me what that character
set is).
The best part is it will seem to do this randomly, not just when I hit send,
but while I'm editing or working in another window it sees fit to steal focus
and say "HEY! OMG! LOOK! Let me tell you about the DANGERS OF UTF-8!"
Then I get a choice. No question is asked, but I get a choice anyway. I can
[Cancel]... but I wasn't doing anything. [2] Does this mean it will cancel
the whole message and maybe close the window or just not send the message?
Kind of ominous. Then there's [Send Anyway] and does that mean to go ahead
and send it in UTF-8 which is what you were warning me about or to go ahead
and send it in my current apparently non-Unicode character set? And, finally,
there's [Send in UTF-8] which is the most sensical of them all... but since
you so rudely interrupted my typing do you mean to send it right now or when
I'm done editing? [3]
Bestest of all is it asks me this FOR EVERY MESSAGE! There's no "always do
this". I've looked through the Composition preferences and there's nothing
about character encodings. I get the choice between "plain text" and lord
knows what that means these days, and HTML. There's just a black smear on the
spot where the "Quoted Printable" option would be for I burnt out that part of
my brain which processes those words.
There appears to be no, "just do the right thing and shut up you stupid blit"
setting. More software needs one of those.
[1] God damnit, it just did it.
[2] And again for a second compose window.
[3] For the rhetorically impaired, those are all rhetorical.
--
7. Not allowed to add “In accordance with the prophesy” to the end of
answers I give to a question an officer asks me.
-- The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army
http://skippyslist.com/list/
