From: Jean-Marc Desperrier (jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com)
Date: Wed Jul 03 2002 - 09:52:06 CDT
Charles Lindsey wrote:
>But there are operating syustems out there that do not understand UTF-8 at
>all. And even my Solaris 7 system, which does understand it, does not do
>so in xterm, because xterm is unchanged since what was written at MIT
>umpteen years ago.
>
There's enough ressources available so that with a some work, you can
get an UTF-8 enabled xterm on any decent unix.
In your case, you should only need to get and compile Dickey's xterm.
http://dickey.his.com/xterm/xterm.html
Even on an unix that does not support UTF-8 at all, with the fonts in
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html and with some of
http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/ and/or
ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/, you should be able to compile
and make work Dickey's xterm.
>>This choice of setting the default to UTF-8 will work, when all messages
>>are in UTF-8, but is completely incompatible with the transition period.
>>
>>
>Which is why we are recommending that user agents should check for UTF-8,
>and revert to the default character set if that check fails. No, existing
>user agents do not do that (except the latest Netscape apparently) so the
>transition period may be chaotic until people are persuaded to invest in
>those new agents. But the current system is already chaotic in that sense.
>
What you say applies to the case of a USEFOR aware user agent that reads messages sent by a non USEFOR aware user agent.
Now, if we take a USEFOR aware user agent, and asks ourself what he should send to be understable to the highest possible number of non USEFOR aware user agent, my answer is RFC 2047.
You can find some user agents that don't understand RFC 2047, but you will not make those any happier by using UTF-8.
If it's a user agent under Windows and doesn't understand RFC 2047, it will not understand UTF-8 either.
If it's a user agent under Unix that can't decode RFC2047, you can make it understand UTF-8, but then it won't read anything that is not in UTF-8 anymore, and this is not a viable setting.
>>[...] if a message in ISO-8859-1 correctly declares the charset,
>>with that setting in the thread list the title will be interpretated as
>>UTF-8, but inside the message panel the message title will be displayed
>>as ISO-8859-1.
>>
>>
>Yes, that is the correct behaviour according to our draft, though testing
>for correct UTF-8, as we now recommend, will improve that.
>
????
The draft never says to apply to all the headers the encoding defined in
the Content-Type header, that's what OE is doing in this case ...