Re: Unicode vs The Rest Of The World (Again) (was Re: Re: Le tilde a-t-il été utilisé en français?)

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:28:43 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 04:46:48PM -0400, Paul Bennett wrote:
>> More worrying than the mere adoption rate is that the List Server itself
>> is **severely** broken when it comes to UTF-8 (and presumably any other
>> full 8-bit encoding). It takes byte values (inside message bodies, I
>> don't
>> know about inside attachments) 128 thru 149 and subtracts 128 from them,
>> leaving you with multi-byte UTF sequences that at best point to the
>> wrong
>> character and at worst form a broken character that is unprintable.
>
> Which would be bad enough if it were just the more typical "8-bit
> characters get munged; you must use 7-bit encoding methods" problem.
> But that's not the case.  The mail server understands the various MIME
> 8-to-7-bit encoding techniques, reverses them, and *then* does
> the replacement anyway just as if the message arrived in 8-bit mode.
Yes.

Is anyone among us (maybe the Lord Of The Instrumentality?) able to get in
touch with the folks at Brown.edu (and or the folks at lsoft.com ?) to see
if this is an expected feature of Listserv, and whether it can be
configured to go away?

It strikes me as verging on the dense to put such a (mis-)feature in on
purpose in this day and age. Maybe once upon a time, when the 8th bit was
somewhat paranormal in nature, it made sense to act this way as a
convenience to users with stupid mail clients/OSes/terminals, but heck,
this is the 21st century already. Sheesh.





Paul

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