From: David Kastrup Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:47:48 GMT Subject: Re: Stupid quoting... Message-ID: <85ejk1cexn.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> In-Reply-To: <200706242139.44708.robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com> Robin Rosenberg 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