--- Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley"
> <nbodley@...> wrote:
> > On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:02:56 -0500, Richard
> Wordingham
> > <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> >
> > > I've been doing some experiments (results at
> > > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JRW_test/messages
> ). The conclusion
> is
> > > that for general character sets, the only
> general purpose workable
> way
> > > from a browser window is for both sender and
> receiver to manually
> select
> > > UTF-7. Unfortunately, this is not available
> from Internet
> Explorer 6.0,
> > > at least not on Windows XP. (It is from
> Firefox, but not everyone
> may
> > > use the browser they prefer.)

My first and main point, is that UTF-8 is just as
suitable as UTF-7.

I suspect that the errors you are seeing in the UTF-8
tests aren't because of UTF-8.

>
> Quick summary of UTF-8:

>
> Thus UTF-8 collides with C1 control codes.
> > 2. Probably identical with 1.; I didn't check
> carefully, char. by char.

collides with C1 control characters? the codepoints
corresponding to c1 in Unicode like the ISO-8859
series are empty.

If you look at the source of the first test message
(Test Posting of Latin-A Via Firefox 1.0 ) you'll find
the following lines in the mail header:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

essentially, the utf-8 message was sent out not as
utf-8, but ISO-8859-1 (actually most windows browsers
and email clients will really use Windows-1252
instead)

so some byte sequences were escaped/transformed based
on the Windows-1252 codepage. which is how the html
quote entities got into the character seqeunce.

So in essence, you're utf-8 test was flawed. You'll
need to redo it, sending the email as actual utf-8
email message.

the US based yahoo email and groups services are
esstenially English based.

I've bene doing soem testing elsewhere for African
languages, what seems to work best is using a email
client like outlook, outlook express, thunderbird,
mozilla mail, etc and setting it to send utf-8 emails,
for viewing within Yahoo email and groups webpages, it
helps to set the web browsers default charset to
utf-8, additionally in Firefox, we setup some Yahoo
specific style rules in userContent.css file to force
yahoo to use appropriate fonts for the languages we
are working with. Since those fonts might differ from
the default fonts we've setup in Firefox's font
options.

Andrew



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