Re: To unicode or not to unicode

* Ross Ridge (Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:39:42 -0500)
Thorsten Kampe <thorsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's right. As long as you use pure ASCII you can skip this nasty step
of informing other people which charset you are using. If you do use non
ASCII then you have to do that. That's the way virtually all newsreaders
work. It has nothing to do with some 21+ year old RFC. Even your Google
Groups "newsreader" does that ('content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"').

No, the original post demonstrates you don't have include MIME headers for
ISO 8859-1 text to be properly displayed by many newsreaders.

*sigh* As you still refuse to read the article[1] I'm going to quote it
now here:

'The Single Most Important Fact About Encodings

If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember
one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string
without knowing what encoding it uses.
[...]
If you have a string [...] in an email message, you have to know what
encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users
correctly.

Almost every [...] "she can't read my emails when I use accents" problem
comes down to one naive programmer who didn't understand the simple fact
that if you don't tell me whether a particular string is encoded using
UTF-8 or ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or Windows 1252 (Western
European), you simply cannot display it correctly [...]. There are over
a hundred encodings and above code point 127, all bets are off.'

Enough said.

The fact that your obscure newsreader didn't display it properly
doesn't mean that original poster's newsreader is broken.

You don't even know if my "obscure newsreader" displayed it properly.
Non ASCII text without a declared encoding is just a bunch of bytes.
It's not even text.

T.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
.

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