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Re: e-mail encoding/formatting (was Re: Split-screen mode in mutt?)



On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 01:06:38PM -0400, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> Heh, much to the detriment? Meh. 

It's nice to speak English, isn't it?  You can just disregard everyone
else's encoding difficulties, blissfully ignorant of the hastle that
you cause...

> I’m encouraging those who use good mail clients (like mutt) to set
> them up in a UTF-8-using way! :) 

A very large percentage of computer users use operating systems that
are still not 100% Unicode functional, making their switching to any
Unicode locale problematical at best, or very likely entirely
impossible.  A great many of those have little or no control over what
they are using.  So you're making trouble for potentially a great many
people.

> And on top of that, it’s good typography. Quotes have a history of
> “correct” usage starting LONG before someone decided to cut corners
> and only have straight quotes available. 

Who cares?  Everyone recognizes straight quotes for what they are, and
they cause no one problems that I have ever heard about.  Curly quotes
do.  Languages evolve and change, and computers have made the straight
quote ubiquitous over the last 40 years.  It's like you're Lady Jane,
demanding that the value of a quid return to some historic
pre-inflation value...

The Chinese used the same complicated characters for thousands of
years, and then scholars decided to simplify them to make things
easier for the masses.  Straight quotes are an example of the same
impetus in action, albeit with a vastly smaller impact.

> Technology has finally gotten around to providing some of the more
> basic features of the Gutenberg printing press. I think this is a
> great thing.

I think you mean obscure and obsolete...

> >[How does one even generate these characters on a Unix system,
> >aside from copy-pasting them from some other source?]
> 
> There’s a terrific little vim extension called UniCycle that does it: 
> http://jason.diamond.name/weblog/2005/10/20/unicycle-script-for-vim

Thanks (sincerely) for the info.  This might turn out to be useful to
me for very different reasons than what we're discussing now...

> >Even better, some Windows applications use this encoding and 
> >incorrectly label the resulting data as iso-8859-1.  Extremely 
> >annoying.
> 
> Eh, add a “charset-hook iso-8859-1 windows-1252” to your muttrc and 
> breathe deeply of the peace of mind.

Which only works if your system actually knows aobut that character
set.  Lots and lots of Unix systems do not.  IIRC even older Windows
systems don't, and DOS definitely doesn't.  All of these are still
in surprisingly wide use, believe it or not.

Another common Microsoft (or just any webmail) brain-death is
mislabeling virtually every encoding as us-ascii.  A lot of
non-English speaking people already have to use Mutt's charset hooks
just to get their own language displayed properly, so this trick won't
work for them...

>  mutt user complaining that email isn’t all 78-column US-ASCII text
>  anymore seems… like complaining that a show you want to watch isn’t
>  on any of your local UHF/VHF stations when you have a perfectly
>  functional satellite dish in the back yard.

I have to pay for the satellite dish...  Everything comes with a
price.  

I use UTF-8, so your choice of encoding does not any longer annoy me,
other than philisophically; however I know a lot of people who are not
native English speakers, and have to deal with this problem all the
time.  It sucks for them, and I sympathize.  It's been brought up
twice in the last month; that should make it clear that you are, in
fact, causing difficulties for people.  For every person who speaks
up, how many do not?

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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