[Mailman-Users] ISO-8859-1/Latin1 vs UTF-8

[Mark Sapiro]

Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
>
>I actually reported a bug (though it may not sound so): I enter
>(apparently) UTF-8 text (with Firefox it that is important) and it comes
>back disguised (and as part of) ISO-8859-1 text.
>The question is: Which part is doing something wrong and how to fix it?

What happens here is that Mailman creates the web page with the META
tag in the header

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

where xxxx is the encoding of the language of the list (default
iso-8859-1 for German), but the web server sends its own http
Content-Type: header specifying charset=utf-8. For reasons I don't
understand, the HTML standard says the server provided Content-Type:
charset takes priority over that specified by an HTML META tag.

Thus your browser sets it's encoding as utf-8, but mailman thinks what
it gets back is iso-8859-1 and thus garbles the multibyte unicode
sequences.

It can be fixed by setting the 'German' character set to utf-8 and
recoding the German language templates, messages and list archives in
utf-8 as discussed in the archive threads I mentioned previously.

Alternatively, it can be addressed in the web server by configuring it
so it doesn't specify these documents as utf-8.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan