Re: [Evolution] i18n buglets

[Ladislav Lhotka <lada lhotka elsatnet cz>]

On 01 Apr 2001 09:14:35 +0930, Not Zed wrote:

> I disagree actually.  The encoded format is terribly unreadable.  We
> dont want to merge the whole subject into a single encoded word just
> because one word needs it.

Well, your view is based on the assumption that non-us-ascii words are
rare. This is not the case for most languages addressed by the
ISO-8859-2 charset and even less so for non-latin alphabets. Besides of
that, I don't really see much difference in readability even between
these two alternatives:

Subject: And =?ISO-8859-1?Q?voil=E1=2C?= here we go!
(Evolution)

Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?And_voil=E1=2C_here_we_go!=            (Pine,
Outlook,...)

> We probably have to do that for various reasons anyway, although I am
> not sure exactly how this is going to work, because of the abstraction
> of the messaging library from the mail client code.

A natural approach would be: Each national environment has a
corresponding charset, so as soon as the user switches to that
environment, everything he writes is considered to be encoded in that
charset, even though some words may by coincidence be classified as
us-ascii or whatever. Just imagine for the moment that all charsets have
equal rights.

Of course, the problem is that most users would not bother with
switching to an English environment even if they wrote in English which
would complicate life to those that don't need/want to know about
other environments than English. But in the current situation, most
users in Central and East Europe take for granted that accented letters
don't work in emails and rather stick to a mutilated language or, which
is even worse, send their mails as Word attachments.

Lada


-- 
Ladislav Lhotka <Lhotka cesnet cz>
CESNET, z.s.p.o.