Re: [tlug] Japanese Encoding - which one?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Lyle" == Lyle Saxon <Lyle> writes:

    Lyle> PS - Um... I was just about to send this when I noticed that
    Lyle> the encoding is: Western (ISO-8859-1)

    Lyle> Since I have my e-mail client set to UTF-8 for composing
    Lyle> messages, I assume the 8859-1 is from the originating
    Lyle> message?  Was that me way back at the start of this thread?
    Lyle> Oops.....

What your header actually says is:

    Lyle> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Why does this happen?  Because it doesn't matter whether your
conversation partner speaks US ASCII, ISO 8859-1, Shift JIS, EUC-JP,
UTF-8, or ISO-2022-JP, _every one_ encodes that message with the same
bytes.

Now, suppose you send the message with "ISO-2022-JP" as the content
type; then dumb clients will say "I don't know how to do that; save to
a file?"  On the other side, even a dumb client able to handle any of
the others can treat "US-ASCII" as an alias for whatever it _does_
handle.

I'm pretty sure the standard for Content-Type recommends that this
kind of weakening of requirements (especially Unicode -> ISO-8859-1 ->
US-ASCII) be done for exactly this reason.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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