Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Peter, and others:

This has got to be my last message on this subject.

This whole question started up with the response to my message 
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/2005-July/023687.html where some 
people complained that the Hebrew text that I typed came out as gibberish. 
Well, looking at the message as stored on the ibiblio server, the Hebrew 
characters were changed, content has been lost, to something that no browser 
nor email client can read as Hebrew.

Peter’s response 
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2005-July/023703.html included 
two examples, one in Windows-1255 character set and the other in “character 
entities” consisting of four sets of ampersand, hash, four numbers and a 
semicolon. When my browser was set to read Windows Hebrew, it rendered both 
examples as Hebrew in the message that arrived in my mailbox. But the message 
as is stored on the ibiblio server has his Windows example changed to 
character entities, and his character entities changed to something that no 
browser nor email client can read as Hebrew.

Curiously, when I quoted Peter on 
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2005-July/023717.html , both 
examples are stored as character entities (the second example was not 
changed) and any modern browser should render both examples as Hebrew. I 
wonder why.....?

Apparently what is happening is that the online email client I use sends html 
mail (Thanks Yitzhak Sapir for clarifying  this) which is being incompletely 
translated to MIME and the Hebrew is lost in translation. However, I can 
receive Hebrew with no problem. I suspect that anyone else who uses an html 
email client would be able to receive Hebrew from me. Peter, your insistance 
that there is a bug was most unhelpful.

Peter, you mentioned that I ought to use a POP mail server. That would be 
MIME complient, but I often need to access my mail from different computers, 
making such an account not workable.

It boils down to that I, and others using html mail, cannot send Hebrew and 
expect all to read it.

When looking up the old messages today, I noticed that all my paragraphs are 
written on one line. That is consistant with good html coding, but makes a 
mess of the archives. Does MIME add a hard return after every so many 
characters to prevent this? If so, how wide should I make the lines?

Karl W. Randolph.