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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: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 23:14:25 +0100

On 18/07/2005 21:53, Karl Randolph wrote:

...

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


Peter: Sorry, I forwarded only that which I though you would find inoffensive. Sorry, my mistake.


Your apology is accepted.

...

What is leaving my computer is html standard. Somewhere, and the headers of messages you sent me do not show where, it is being translated to MIME: is it when it leaves email.com, as a front end program accepting emails at ibiblio, or at an intervening node? Neither of us knows. ...


Actually, I do know. Because you sent messages both directly to me and to b-hebrew. The versions I was looking at had come to me direct, not via ibiblio. And they contained the same corrupted data as are in the ibiblio archives. So the corruption must have taken place at the last common point: your mail server.

... An html messages will arrive at another html reader without losing content, however, it will show up on a MIME reader as gibberish. Obviously, MIME is far more limited than html.


Well, not entirely gibberish: it will appear as HTML source, which consists of characters in a specified encoding. But this is not what has happened: I did not receive from you proper HTML source, but plain text apart from what looked like HTML character entities.

Html mail is a feature. MIME is a far more limited email standard, is a feature. The two are incompatible, that too is a feature, not a bug. ...


They are not incompatible. Rather, HTML e-mail is built on MIME. MIME provides facilities for indicating whether e-mail (in fact a part of an e-mail) is HTML or plain text, or another format, or an attachment. Plain text e-mail can be either basic MAIL format (which is ASCII only) or MIME (which can be in any of the encodings registered for MIME including Windows-1255 and UTF-8).

... That there is not a good translator from html to MIME is also a feature (unless there is a claim that such a translator exists). ...


No converter can translate the formatting information of HTML into plain text, or of HTML MIME e-mail to plain text MIME e-mail. But converters can extract the plain text from HTML e-mail and convert it to plain text in a suitable encoding. But for generality a suitable encoding must support all Unicode characters, which means it must be UTF-8. The problem arose because your mail software attempted to convert HTML into ASCII or Windows-1252 encoded e-mail. But it could not do this conversion properly when it came across Hebrew characters, encoded in HTML as character entities. So, instead of aborting, or asking for user input (as my mail program does in these circumstances), or inserting question marks (some programs do this), it passed through the character entities unchanged at the encoding level - which unfortunately meant a change in the content. This is perhaps not a stupid decision, but it is an unfortunate one in this context, and compounded by the reverse error, which is actually avoidable, of interpreting anything that looks like a character entity as a character entity, even in plain text when such a string cannot be a character entity.

That ibiblio accepts only MIME encoded messages is a feature.

This one is in fact a deliberate choice of the moderators of this list.

Be up front about features, that ibiblio accepts only MIME, and it would have saved a lot of hassle and time.


Well, I think it has been clear from the very start of this discussion that the b-hebrew list accepts only plain text MIME e-mail, and not HTML e-mail. In fact Kirk Lowery wrote this on 10th July; he didn't explicitly mention MIME, but he made it clear that (for reasons which I would contest, but that's another matter) HTML is not accepted by this list.

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



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