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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: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 23:26:59 +0100

On 16/07/2005 03:09, Karl Randolph wrote:

Peter:

Back on list.


Karl, I do not appreciate you copying to this list material which I sent to you on list (snipped from below).

I have been using this account for years, and only in B-Hebrew have I received complaints of mangled reception. But then it is also the only place where I have attempted extensive transmission of other than ASCII messages. The two may be related. I don't know if they are related.


I don't know either, but I think they probably are related.

Second, is the archiving software at ibiblio limited to correctly encoded MIME messages? State it right out, don't beat around the bush saying that html messages or other such are produced by buggy programs. Then it is a feature, not a bug, when it mangles non-MIME encoded messages, and non-MIME text strings within messages. State it clearly that a MIME complient mail program must be used and stop these bug accusations if MIME is a requirement. If MIME is not a requirement, then those are bugs.


There is no bug in the archiving software. This software correctly transforms the encoding of certain characters into a form which is valid in an HTML page. To do this, it needs to among other things "escape" all ampersands to avoid them being misinterpreted as the start of a character entity. This is standard practice in HTML encoding.

But yes, the software, like all e-mail software, does assume that e-mail it receives follows the standard for e-mail transmission, either the original MAIL standard or the extensions to it known as MIME. And for encodings other than ASCII the MIME standard must be followed. If you try to communicate with others using software which does not follow the standards for e-mail, then you can hardly be surprised that others do not receive what you intended.

In principle your mail software might make no attempt to comply with MIME but might support only the old MAIL standard. In that case it would not surprisingly get confused when you try to use it to send non-ASCII characters. But that does not seem to be true of your mail software, because you are able to send partially MIME-compliant messages. And the messages you send to me direct include the line "Mime-Version: 1.0", which is an explicit claim to comply with MIME version 1.0. So, I have to conclude that your software is claiming to comply with MIME but in fact is not doing so. That implies that there are bugs in it - or that the authors are making deliberately misleading claims.


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



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