Peter:
Content is exactly what is being lost when character entities are changed to
html text strings.
That non-ASCII characters are stored in the archives as character entities
means that they can not be quoted without losing content.
The encoding is defined by <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=us-ascii"> means that the only way to show non-ASCII characters is to have them in
ASCII coding, such as character entities. There is no Windows-1255 or UTF-8 encoding. Therefore, in
order not to lose content, such coding must be stored unchanged. It changes them.
At first I was ready to blame your email program. Now I realize it is deeper
than that. We are dealing with incompatible systems, some of which have been
around for some time. The earliest non-MIME complient standard was developed
to show Asian characters, and one of the earliest MIME challenges was how to
transmit those messages unchanged. (I’d forgotten about uuencoding, a way to
transmit non-ASCII data as ASCII strings.)
You blame the mail program I am using. How it sends messages, i.e. the
encoding it uses, I am not sure. However it appears that it sends ASCII
strings. For non-ASCII characters, that would mean character entities. ...
... For receiving messages, it is designed to be read through a browser such
as Firefox, Camino and Mozilla, so it passes on whatever message it receives
unchanged: if Windows-1255, I can tell the browser to read it; if UTF-8, a
different setting; if character entities, sent to the browser unchanged so
that the content could be displayed unlost. Of course, I speculate because I
don’t have enough data.
Then we have the ibiblio archiving program that takes only us-ascii. When it
receives data, it loses content if that data is already encoded in character
entities to be compatible with ASCII, because it changes it so that the data
is no longer character entities. That losing content is certainly a bug.
The question is, what are we as a forum going to do about these incompatible
standards? Shall we make it a rule that in order to participate, we need to
use a certain standard? If so, which? Should the technically savvy among us
draw up a list of approved email clients, recommending that only those be
used by list members? ??
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