Howto: 32 bit skype, working with a webcam, on 64 bit Fedora 17

Ed Greshko Ed.Greshko at greshko.com
Mon Oct 22 08:19:39 UTC 2012


On 10/22/2012 04:11 PM, Tim wrote:
> Ed Greshko:
>>> I don't think it is very common to see UTF-7. 
>> FWIW....   Contained within http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html
>>
>> It should be noted that the Unicode Standard also defines the UTF-7
>> charset, which was intended for Internet mail. However, MIME is quite
>> capable of carrying UTF-8, and UTF-8 is expected to be used in many
>> protocols, not just Internet mail. Fortunately, very few vendors
>> implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet
>> mail.
> Discouraged by who?  It's supposedly *the* answer to email, to stop
> allegedly helpful mail services transcoding 8 bit mail on the way
> through, just because it thinks 8-bit mail is a bad idea (plenty of
> people have wacky views on that, too), whether that 8-bit is UTF-8 or
> anything else that's 8-bit text.
>
> My own experiments with pushing mail through various external servers
> has shown plenty of annoyingly helpful servers transcoding UTF-8 plain
> text into base64 encoded, or even quoted-printable, both of which are a
> pain in various ways.  Whereas they left UTF-7 alone.
>
> Anyway, any modern mail software (server or client) which screws up
> UTF-7, as in the original responder's reply, is seriously broken.  
>
> And I feel similarly for software which foolishly go about transcoding
> mail.  If I get a mail in an encoding that the client doesn't
> automatically handle, I can opt to try viewing it with a forced
> selection of different encoding types.  It's hard to do that if a
> transcoder has taken a format and mangled it, instead of just passing it
> through.
>

Whatever....  UFT-7 isn't widely used....  But if you want to use it go ahead.
Must be an Australian thing....  :-) :-)

-- 
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. -- Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled


More information about the users mailing list