David Starner <dstarner98@...> wrote:

>> One of the the most successful mailing lists that I belong to is
>> 'honyaku', for JE/EJ commercial translators. One reason for its
>> success is that, from the start, it asked members to use only
>> iso-2022-jp for encoding Japanese.
>
> But this being an English list, it's not that big a problem (I don't
> think anyone is going to be throwing EBCDIC around here.)

Oh yeah? æêü£@"ü'_¢@"-@¢-@¢Ö_o

Seriously, though, I think the concern was that on those occasions
when we do step out of the ASCII range, we need to be mutually
intelligible. The vast majority of recent Qalam postings have been
about Han character decomposition, and some have gone into great
detail about glyph shapes and elements. Being able to see those on
screen in a consistent way may be important to some participants.

My preference on this list, as everywhere else, is to (1) recommend
UTF-8 as a default, and (2a) allow other encodings but also (2b)
insist that they be tagged appropriately. It's not fair to send me
KOI-8 or CP1251 and expect me to read it if you don't signal the
encoding somehow. (And yes, I have voted in the approved manner.)

My e-mail software, both at home and at work, is too stupid or
outdated to understand UTF-8 and displays it as Latin-1, but I can
always use recode (as David suggests) and I would rather convert one
encoding (UTF-8) than several.

-Doug Ewell
posting from work in Irvine, California