In a message dated 2001-07-12 8:55:07 Pacific Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> So the proposal is that minimizing the charset is a good thing?
>
> This means that you and I start out in a conversation about a
> product I am trying to sell you, it happens to be all in ascii
> and we exchange several mails successfully. Then I quote you
> a price in Euros and my 1252 message gets corrupted by your
> reader which can handle either only 8859-1 or ASCII, and
> you miss the fact that the Euro is corrupted and think we
> are talking dollars or some other currency.
>
> Although I understand why you would want a minimal charset in order
> to not needlessly prevent communications, the implication of
> reliability and trust that is built by having some success is
> a problem. You think you are communicating successfully but when it
> is critical it may not...
The premise seems to be that we should reject, or at least issue a warning
against, the earlier messages on the basis that the sender *might* be able to
send characters in the future that the receiver could not receive. Sorry,
but I can't buy into that. That would prevent the CP1252 user from ever
being able to communicate adequately with anyone who has "only" ISO 8859-1.
What if I am trying to exchange mail with a user of Windows-1256? Lots of
roadblocks would be erected because of the chance that the guy *might* send
me ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH HAMZA BELOW and I couldn't interpret it. And I
couldn't exchange mail with UTF-8 users either, because of that YI SYLLABLE
BBOP they might send me some day.
> Perhaps if a harder line was taken when characters
> are used that cannot be converted, this would make more sense.
> (ie give a very clear recognizable indication of corruption or
> conversion failures)
That's reasonable. Simply replacing unknown characters with '?' doesn't
work; the character is too easily overlooked. I would like to see mailers
replace unsupported characters with a Unicode representation like "[U+A068]".
(That would certainly help with this spate of CJK characters that people are
sending lately on the Unicode list!) I suspect that's too much Unicode
awareness to ask of an otherwise Unicode-unaware product, though.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
