Re: [tlug] ADMIN: Second Warning (was: Japanese Encoding - which one?)

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Josh Glover wrote:

> > [JG] I believe I asked once that this thread be returned to technical
> > topics only. Flaming is definitely  not that.
> >    
>
> I have been asked to illuminate this comment farther by explaining
> just where I think this thread got off into unfriendly ground. Here is
> my attempt.
>
> The thread started with one guy asking for help with his webpages: it
> appeared that Japanese encoding issues were preventing Google AdSence
> from detecting Japanese appropriately. Several people responded, and
> the outcome of this was that the OP became excited (and rightly so)
> about UTF-8, and said that he had just switched his MUA over to UTF-8.
>
> So far, so good.
>
> Then someone else replies that (and I quote) "[u]sing UTF for for
> Japanese email breaches RFCs, you are supposed to use 2022-JP".
> Several people act surprised and ask, "which RFC, where?" At which
> point there is some clarification, but also some defensiveness.
>  
Well - what got that going was when I sent an e-mail that I encoded in 
UTF-8 and someone (might as well skip all names) noticed that it didn't 
display correctly on their work computer that is set up to correspond 
with the locals that they communicate with via e-mail.  I must say that, 
first off, the technical issue that became contentious I don't 
understand, so I can't even comment on that, *but*, the information that 
a lot of the computers on these islands will pull in ISO-2022-JP text, 
but not UTF-8 is of immense value to me!  I have been writing to my 
Japanese friends in English because I had come to realize (without 
knowing why) that half the time they were getting garbled text when I 
tried to send them anything in Japanese.  My concern first and foremost 
was the website, but this secondary information was *very* welcome.  In 
fact, I just tested it again by sending two (Japanese content) messages 
to a friend's cell phone, one in UTF-8 and one in ISO-2022-JP.  
Unfortunately only the ISO-2022-JP one was intelligible.  The UTF-8 one 
was a mixture of wrong kanji and symbols.

So - I'm sorry for being indirectly responsible for a contentious issue 
arising.  Again, the technical reasons for the discussion are mostly 
flying far over my head, but practically speaking, *both* the conversion 
to UTF-8 for web pages and to ISO-2022-JP for Japanese-only messages to 
my Japanese friends is of immense value to me (and maybe others as 
well).  While I was only trying to solve a web page issue, my Japanese 
e-mail problem (an issue that was losing me friends through my inability 
to send them Japanese e-mail!) has also been solved.

All the information was of great interest.  I hope there is no lasting 
damage from my having branched the issue into practical text stuffing - 
an issue that should not have been piggybacked onto a technical issue 
regarding web page construction.  If I had started a new thread 
regarding sending Japanese e-mail to whoever using whatever software in 
this country, there probably wouldn't have been any problem in the first 
place.

In closing, I say both thank you and sorry.  This should have been two 
separate issues.

Lyle