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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew in messages

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew in messages
  • Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:06:07 +0100

On 14/07/2005 02:32, Karl Randolph wrote:

...

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.


I did not send character entities. There is no way that I can send character entities to this list (although I may have confused you by referring to them at the time as "character entities"), because this list does not accept HTML, and character entities are an HTML concept. What I sent was strings of ASCII characters consisting of four sets of ampersand, hash, four numbers and a semicolon. The archiving software correctly stored them as such. Your mail reader misinterpreted this string as Hebrew characters.

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.....?


That happened because you sent this message in Windows-1255 encoding. Your mail program misinterpreted what it received as Hebrew characters, and then when replying sent out Hebrew characters. It did so a legal encoding recognised by the archiving software, because it was able to do so within Windows-1255 encoding, and so did not make the illegal conversion to character entities.

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.


The messages you send, even the ones which come directly to me and so did not have their HTML parts stripped by the list server, are not in HTML format. I accept that your mail program may be composing these as if they were in HTML format and then stripping out the HTML. But when doing this it leaves the character entities in place although these should not be in plain text e-mail. This is the bug in your software, or one half of it.

Your insistence that there is a bug in the list archiving software is most unhelpful, not least because it is untrue.

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.


Fair enough. But there are MIME compliant webmail programs. I don't know if you are in any position to choose your own webmail program or have to use one provided by your mail service provider, presumably email.com. In the latter case, you should report this issue to them as a bug.

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


But, Karl, you are not using HTML e-mail. At least what you are sending to this list, and even to me, is not HTML. It is plain text, except that it includes what are intended as HTML character entities, but are not understood as such in plain text. I wonder, have you made some setting that all mail to this list is sent in plain text format? That should be a sensible setting, but your mail program seems not to implement it correctly.

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?


This is another even more complex issue which I don't want to get into, as it is not a problem when I view your messages. Is it a problem for others? But it does seem to be an indication that your mail program is getting confused between plain text and HTML.


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



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