Antoine Leca wrote:
> Well, some months ago, Michael Everson complained about receiving
> UTF-8 (that his software was not able to properly decode), and there
> were a bunch of replies to highlight that this list should be among the
> first ones where UTF-8 are to be used.
> That said, I would consider politeness too, and this stresses to the
> least common denominator, ASCII (and *not* iso-8859-1 ;-)).
>
Politeness should be kept in mind.
If the Unicode e-list group can't handle Unicode e-mail, though,
there probably isn't much hope for non-technical people.
The simulated drop-cap full-width hack in my recent letter
wasn't intended to be annoying, there were only three such
Latin letters in the letter. It was expected that folks would
either see a few pseudo drop-caps in plain text, or they would
see mojibake (the subject of that message). Purely illustrative,
won't make a habit of it. It was also a way of saying "me too"
to Mike Ayers' thoughts on using UTF-8 on this list without
writing a "me too" letter. If anyone is annoyed, please be annoyed
with the computer system/software.
> I never received any complaint when I did that (often to allow proper
> use of the French oe U+0153, or to display Cyrillic or Greek inline with
> Latin languages).
>
I've sent letters using UTF-8 in the past, but usually stick
to ASCII. Here, the Outlook Express is set to use UTF-8 as the
default encoding and works very well.
>
> Just a sidepoint here: in my multinational context, we are looking after
> solutions to handle at the same time Cyrillic and French. And it appears
> that the e-mailing tools now are not ready to send plain text utf-8
> (this particularly applies to the web-mail tools); on the other side, using
> HTML gives nice results, even with very old e-mail clients (because the
> HTML text ends as a attached file, which is displayed under the default
> browser when activated).
>
HTML has been an option for multilingual mailing on some set-ups
for a while, yet there are people who object to HTML mail, too.
Best regards,
James Kass.
