Re: Subject üî
On Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 16:30:42 -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> I had already de-selected "Wide Glyphs count as two columns"
I wonder what does this option?
> For sending emails with such [curly quotes] characters in them (as
> I do a *lot*) is it really better to send them encoded as windows-1252
> than as utf-8?
I think so. Those charsets are equally legal: They are both
registred by IANA for usage as MIME charset label. They will both
display equally well, for the vast majority of recipients. They will
both display equally bad, for those recipients unable to display curly
quotes (example: Mutt on a Latin-1 console). So far no difference.
Then there is the case of recipients with not charset-aware mailer,
be it old, simple, powerless, embedded, or whatever reason. Typically
such mailer displays the mails as-is, unconverted. If the mailer's
display is say Latin-1, then Latin-1 mails are well displayed, and
everything else bad. A minority of such mailers may well run in an UTF-8
terminal. But they will more typically run on a Latin-1 terminal, or in
a CP-1252 window. They will display well CP-1252 curly quotes, or at
least most common accented characters. While UTF-8 mails will have both
curlies and accents garbled. Conclusion: CP-1252 mails have better
chances to be readable, and if broken then less broken, than UTF-8
mails. Exceptions pro-UTF do exist, but are quite rare.
Other arguments exist: CP-1252 makes shorter mails than UTF-8.
CP-1252 was invented by a well known commercial company; UTF-8 by some
evil bearded unix guru. ;-)
Bye! Alain.
--
« If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there. »
Ken Thompson