Re: Stupid quoting...

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jun 24, 2007, 19:47 UTC
Message-ID: <85ejk1cexn.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <200706242139.44708.robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com>

Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com> writes:

> I was still in referernce to those "local conditions" at that
> point. It was not meant as a universal statement. Substitutute that
> for "A small bunch of swedish speaking people from Stockholm".

A wrong encoding is a wrong encoding. Escaping the characters in transition will not magically make the encodings adapt. Escaping characters buys us exactly zilch _unless_ the _channel_ is not 8-bit clean. In which case we should use a normal mail-armoring/attachment/inline data wrapper.

In fact, when using editors with some heuristics regarding character sets (like Emacs), leaving 8-bit characters intact gives the editor a chance to guess the correct character set even if it is not the default on the receiving end.

Escaping the characters, in contrast, just hides 8-bit usage away in transition. An escaped character in the wrong encoding will get reconstituted into the wrong encoding.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum