[FFML] Question about how to keep the text as is after submitted

[Kalle Blomster]

Adrian Tymes wrote:
> And even in 2008, ASCII remains the standard.
No. The "standard" is whatever the locale setting of the computer in question defaults to. In the absolute majority of all cases this is Windows-1252 (same as ISO-8859-1 for all practical intents and purposes), but in Europe it can a whole range of "interesting" Windows or ISO encodings; or if you happen to live in Japan (or have a computer that thinks it does) it can be either ShiftJIS, EUC-JP or something else (ISO-2022-JP? all are very incompatible with each other), and on newer Linux boxes the default locale is usually UTF8.

However, unless you're ACTUALLY using an Apple II or something like it, it will never be 7-bit US-ASCII. Absolutely noone uses that anymore. I know the FFML FAQ tells you to use US-ASCII, and the list server really does set the headers to say 7-bit US-ASCII, but since it doesn't enforce that by stripping the 8th bit, in practice most messages to the list happily disregard it and include characters other than the original 94 printable US-ASCII characters. This usually works anyway because most mail clients have learned to not trust the charset headers, and most everyone uses Win1252 or something compatible with it so it comes out right anyway (see f.ex. the most definitely non-ascii copyright and 1/2 symbols in an earlier message).

As for the UTF8 support... mutt (Unix terminal-based client) supports it (and so does all decent terminal programs and SSH clients). Microsoft Outlook supports it (yes, even ancient versions). Eudora (version 8 and on) supports it. Mozilla Thunderbird supports it. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, they all support it. In fact I cannot think of a single email client that DOESN'T support UTF8, which might be because the Internet Mail Consortium recommended that all mail clients should be able to read UTF8-encoded mail... in 1998. Not in 2008, in 1998. (Source: http://www.imc.org/mail-i18n.htm) If there is a commercial mail server that doesn't handle UTF8 properly still left in the world, I dare you to find it. Isn't it time we moved on?

I have no idea what your source for the statement about recent versions of Microsoft Word versions breaking Unicode support might be but I seriously doubt its accuracy given that Word has supported Unicode for at least ten years (Office 97). Word 2007 has some LAYOUT problems with certain Unicode ligatures, but that's a display issue and not an output issue.

> Sorry, but that is a definite DO.  Otherwise, well - see the above.
> Notice how broken the text appears to be, when another mail client
> imposes its own thoughts on automatic wrapping, which can best be
> avoided by wrapping your own text.
For some reason Thunderbird was set to auto-wrap at 80 characters. Damn, now I look really dumb. :(

KB