Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 12/07/2005 15:55, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Peter:
>
> This will probably also be my last message in this string.
>
> Yes, you have repeatedly _claimed_ that there is a bug, actually two as you 
> state again below, in my email program. But you have not demonstrated what 
> that bug is. All I have are your unsubstantiated claims. ...

I have provided adequate substantiation for my claims. I will provide 
nothing more except to refer you to 
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2045.txt which is the standard for 
plain text e-mail in encodings other than US-ASCII. Note that this 
standard is quite independent of HTML, and supports header lines like 
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8".

> ... I don’t mean this as a personal attack, and please don’t take it as such, 
> but when the evidence that I can find points elsewhere, I find it hard to 
> accept your claims without more proof on your part. So far the only evidence 
> you have proferred is that your mail program cannot read Hebrew encoded in 
> character entities: but your mail program can’t read character entities 
> anyways, so you have presented evidence of the limited nature of your mail 
> program, not that there is a bug in the one I use.
>  

My mail program is very well able to read HTML character entities, when 
they are part of HTML e-mail. But when it receives e-mail which is NOT 
HTML, it makes the correct choice NOT to read HTML character entities. 
But at this point your mail program makes an incorrect choice, to 
interpret plain text as if it is HTML although it is not HTML.

> Furthermore, you claim that this is plain text only email forum. Windows-1255 
> encoding is not plain text. ...

This is a misunderstanding of the concept of plain text. In the e-mail 
context, plain text is contrasted with rich text, and the main form of 
rich text used in e-mail is HTML. Plain text e-mail can use any one of a 
large number of character encodings, as defined in RFC2045 which I 
referred you to. But HTML character entities are, for obvious reasons I 
hope, not usable in plain text.


> ... Therefore either your mail program can read no Hebrew characters at all, 
> or it is not truly plain text only. ...

My mail program is indeed not plain text only. But when it receives an 
e-mail which is described as plain text, it processes it as plain text, 
not as HTML. Nevertheless, it can read Hebrew characters in plain text 
e-mail when these are properly indicated by the character encoding.

> ... It obviously cannot read character entities, which is an international 
> standard connected with unicode, to which you have admitted.
>  

It can read character entities, when these are properly part of an HTML 
format e-mail. It does not read character entities in plain text.

> The ibiblio software does have a bug. It takes character entities and changes 
> them, distorts them, into html text strings which no browser nor mail program 
> can read as characters. ...

No, it does not have a bug. As all messages on this list are plain text, 
none of them contain HTML character enitities, but only plain text 
strings which might be misinterpreted as character entities. It 
therefore correctly transforms them into HTML strings which display in 
the same way as the original plain text string.

> ... It looks as if the next time the issue comes up, it should start with a 
> survey of mail programs, to find capable ones that can read international 
> standards.
>  

When that survey takes place, it will find that mine does accord with 
international standards (a top priority of the Mozilla team) but yours 
does not.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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