[Mailman-Developers] translation of mail templates

[Mark Sapiro]

On 8/26/2012 2:12 PM, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:
> * Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>:

>> Templates for web pages or pieces of web pages should have all
>> non-ascii characters encoded as HTML entities, e.g. '&auml;',
>> '&ouml;', etc.
>
> Seriously? Is there a particular reason we can't go UTF-8 and use 'ä', 'ö'
> the way they are written natively?


Yes, there is a reason. HTML entities are a standard way of representing
non-ascii characters in HTML that survives miscommunication of character
set information between web applications, web servers and web browsers.

Mailman is developed as much as possible to work on multiple servers
operated by different people with different configurations. It is
possible to configure web servers to include a Content-Type: header with
a charset parameter when sending a text/html response which will
override the charset parameter in the Content-Type: that Mailman puts in
a META tag in the HTML. (See, e.g.,
<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset>).

If mailman generates web pages with non-ascii, say utf-8 encoded
characters and the installation's web server assigns a default character
set other than utf-8, all the utf-8 encoded characters will be garbled.
This will not happen if the characters are encoded as HTML entities.

I know you wouldn't do such a thing, but if such a thing is possible,
some Mailman installations somewhere will do it.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan