Dear David,
In message
<a1d01bb0-6913-4d42-8304-9802cef88ca8(_at_)HUBCAS2(_dot_)seas(_dot_)wustl(_dot_)edu>
you wrote:
Either fixmhmsg should not touch the HTML part at all, i. e. leave it
quoted-printable encoded as it was in the original message, or, if it
decodes it, it should use the same character set for all parts.
I'd rather not leave it as quoted-printable. More generally, the content
could be base64 encoded, which I would really want to decode.
Yes, I understand your intentions. But I cannot see how this could be
done easily...
Using two different character sets for parts in a single message is
somehow bound to break...
I'm not sure what mhfixmsg should do here. Should it convert
text/html content? All text content?
Well, converting all text content would at least be consistent - but
this would raise new problems. For example, the HTML text in question
looks like this:
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Exchange Server">
...
If we convert the text to UTF-8, we would probably confuse the
browser, when we present a UTF-8 encoded file which claims to be
iso-8859-1. And I feel that parsing and modifying the actual content
of the message parts is something that should NOT be done.
OTOH, we might always have such a problem. We cannot know if even
a text/plain part comes in some internal format that includes
information about the used character set. So converting is always
a somewhat risky operation.
It depends on the user - speaking for myself only, I would happily
accept this risk for text/plain parts, as the number of cases where
this is really helpful is huge compared to ny theoretical pitfalls;
for text/html I hesitate, as the very first example I ran into shows
such a problem.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
--
DENX Software Engineering GmbH, Managing Director: Wolfgang Denk
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd(_at_)denx(_dot_)de
"Plan to throw one away. You will anyway."
- Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
_______________________________________________
Nmh-workers mailing list
Nmh-workers(_at_)nongnu(_dot_)org
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers