Greetings to all!
Ben Gertzfield
"Martin" == Martin v Löwis
writes: Ben> Or we could give an option to replace text that could not be Ben> converted to Unicode with a message, eh? What's the harm in Ben> allowing both?
Martin> Who would be controlling this option, and how? If the list Martin> admin: why is she in a better position to make a decision Martin> than we are?
I think the list admin should have the right to decide if they do not wish their customers' terminals to get messed up when browsing illegally encoded text.
I followed this discussion, and strongly second Ben's opinion that an archiver always should output correctly coded pages - no exception! Be liberal in what you accept, but conservative in what we emit. Martin, please re-think about it. Only following this principle ensures to end up with a stable problem free product! Maybe another idea to solve the problem: If the charset of a message is not specified, we first might use heuristics to guess the encoding - in many cases this is possible. But if we really don't know which encoding is used, I'd prefer to replace this message with a _LINK_ saying "text with unknown encoding" which points to a seperate page showing the message in question. This way we only produce correctly encoded output on the main pages, and warn in advance where the encoding potentially might be screwed, but still don't leave out a bit of information. Future talk: to this latter page we maybe even could add a form where readers can suggest which encoding should be used, and this gathered input could be used to finally integrate the message properly ... Cheers, Martin