[Mailman-Developers] translation of mail templates

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Sapiro writes:

 > 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.

So have Mailman do the encoding.  Mandate that the input data such as
templates are UTF-8, that template writers are responsible for
ensuring that entities (eg, &) are syntactically correct (they
will not be HTML-escaped), the output HTML pages are ASCII, and have
Mailman do the translation of non-ASCII to HTML entities.  Patrick
gets what he wants, Mailman's generated pages are robust to webservers
with broken encoding configs, and it is simple to check whether a user
has done something stupid like encode their templates in Windows-1252.

Note that this can be done algorithmically by using the horribly ugly
Unicode "entities", and the extension to prettier named entities is
easy.

You could even provide a config option to turn off HTML escaping
(defaulting to escaping on).  If somebody has the skills to look at
HTML source in a browser and cares, they probably have the skills to
configure a webserver properly.

Steve