mhonarc-users

Re: why no META tag for charset?

2000-04-20 21:09:52
On April 20, 2000 at 12:05, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:

  <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO646-SE">

But as far as I can tell, MHonArc won't produce that meta tag. Thus
the character set information is lost, which can result in a difficult
to render web page.

I suspect there is a reason for this, but I'm not sure what it
is.  (I know there will be an issue if email contains multiple
character sets, since this is not supported in HTML documents.)

This is the problem, HTML does not support mixed character sets.
Also, the charset affects the entire HTML document.  Therefore, your
resource settings would have to conform with the charset, and this
can be a big problem if messages existing in the archive have different
specified charsets.  It would be hard to guarantee that all messages
will use the same charset.

Now, HTML 4.0 recommends the use of Unicode.  A solution is to
have all messages converted to Unicode.  Problems: web browsers
may not completely support Unicode and Unicode support in Perl
is not common-place.  Perl 5.6 is supposed to have direct support
for Unicode.  The main thing is to see if Perl has modules to
support charset translations like Java.

        --ewh

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