[Mailman-i18n] Subject lines in Archives

[Martin Ramsch]

Greetings to all!

Ben Gertzfield <che@debian.org> wrote:
> >>>>> "Martin" == Martin v Löwis <loewis@informatik.hu-berlin.de> writes:
>
>     Ben> Or we could give an option to replace text that could not be
>     Ben> converted to Unicode with a message, eh?  What's the harm in
>     Ben> allowing both?
>
>     Martin> Who would be controlling this option, and how? If the list
>     Martin> admin: why is she in a better position to make a decision
>     Martin> than we are?
>
> I think the list admin should have the right to decide if they do not
> wish their customers' terminals to get messed up when browsing
> illegally encoded text.

I followed this discussion, and strongly second Ben's opinion that an archiver
always should output correctly coded pages - no exception!

Be liberal in what you accept, but conservative in what we emit.

Martin, please re-think about it.  Only following this principle ensures
to end up with a stable problem free product!

Maybe another idea to solve the problem:

  If the charset of a message is not specified, we first might use heuristics
  to guess the encoding - in many cases this is possible.
  But if we really don't know which encoding is used, I'd prefer to replace
  this message with a _LINK_ saying "text with unknown encoding" which
  points to a seperate page showing the message in question.

  This way we only produce correctly encoded output on the main pages,
  and warn in advance where the encoding potentially might be screwed,
  but still don't leave out a bit of information.

  Future talk:  to this latter page we maybe even could add a form where
  readers can suggest which encoding should be used, and this gathered
  input could be used to finally integrate the message properly ...

Cheers,
  Martin