[Mailman-i18n] Subject lines in Archives

[Martin v. Löwis]

Ben Gertzfield <che@debian.org> writes:

> Not everyone views these archives with a GUI web browser that contains
> work-arounds for all the invalid encoded text in the world; we need to
> be liberal in what we accept, but conservative in what we emit.

In a GUI browser, it is not at all dangerous, we appear to agree on
that. I'd claim that the majority uses GUI browsers these days, so it
is not really clear why the majority should suffer for the comfort of
a few.

> I know I would prefer a message like "(text with unknown encoding)"
> over a garbled Japanese terminal any day.

If that is really a concern to you (it is none to me, since I don't
use a web browser that may corrupt my terminal), then I think the
non-ASCII or control bytes could be qp-encoded - just supressing the
text would drop the usability of the archive.

Notice that this isn't just necessary for the subjects - it is needed
for arbitrary body text as well (and so independent from the subject
we are discussing right now).

Regards,
Martin