Re: faq dispatching a myth (or myths) about unicode

At 19:23 04/01/29 -0500, Tex Texin wrote:
>(I changed the subject)
>
>html is often sent by mail. Misinformation about unicode is harmful to people
>considering unicode for their web pages and undermines our credibility, since
>we are proponents of using unicode everywhere on the web.
>
>I wasn't trying to address viruses, just the misinformation that it spread.
>However, that said, web pages certainly carry related security risks, if not
>viruses.
>Weren't there concerns with anchors being used to run exes? maybe also pngs
>being executable.
>(Hard to remember if those were myths or true, which I guess underscores my
>point! ;-) )

Yes, that was an issue a year or two ago. It would have made a good
FAQ, because it's indeed Web-related. It's probably a bit too late now.


>Although, one might think the reason unicode was in a binary was due to a 
>7-bit
>limitation of mail, most people would think the limitation was that mail 
>wasn't
>capable of transmitting 16-bit unicode.

It is true that mail can't transmit 16-bit unicode. But the spam in some
cases explicitly menioned UTF-8, and in others 7-bit. And that is indeed
an issue, although the solution to it is content transfer encoding rather
than zip.


>The interpretations of the message I am concerned with, should be through the
>eyes of a non-expert.
>The experts dismissed the mail as probably false, quickly.
>
>It seems providing more understanding about unicode (not viruses or email) is
>something geo covers. But it is just a suggestion so if there are no takers,
>its ok.

Yes. But we should cover things that are really related to the Web,
not just everything related to Unicode.


Regards,   Martin.

Received on Friday, 30 January 2004 16:57:42 UTC