Re: UTF-8 recommendation [Was: a few problems in O-charset-lang.html]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, KUROSAKA Teruhiko wrote:

> I'd be a little bit careful about recommending UTF-8 as
> THE encoding of choice.

 I'd not be worried as much as you do as far as documents on the web
are concerned (as you later wrote.)

> I also noticed that mailing list management GUI does not
> display the UTF-8/MIME encoded subject properly.
> This is a mailing list service of one of the major search engine
> companies, not a start-up company that might not have money

   Well, when it comes to the web mail service or mailing list service,
large companies are notorious for very poor I18N. (I bet start-up
companies could do a lot better than those large companies.) They
include Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Lycos, and so forth. They could have fixed
it years ago, but they'd not listen.  On the other hand, recent versions
of open source mailing list tools like GNU mailman handles RFC 2045 -
2049 rather well.

> to invest.  From this experiment, I have to sadly conclude
> that UTF-8 is not for prime time use as an e-mail encoding.

  As long as your recipients use modern email clients instead of
relying on 'stupid, out-of-date' web mail services, UTF-8 is
perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there are a lot of web mail
users. My rule of thumb is to use UTF-8 except when sending to
web mail users.

> do support UTF-8 but some mobile phone browser may not be
> supporting UTF-8.  We should make a research first before

  On this, I agree that we need to do some research.

  Jungshik

Received on Sunday, 1 August 2004 13:03:42 UTC