gnupic: SDCC > M$loth-format > X-Mailer: Apple Mail
Subject:
Re: SDCC > M$loth-format > X-Mailer: Apple Mail
From:
####@####.####
Date:
2 Jan 2005 11:15:57 +0000
Message-Id:
On 2 Jan 2005, Paul B. Webster wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 00:36, ####@####.#### wrote:
> > > I've always thought that the top-posting and funny chars:
> > > "=3D", "=20" come from M$loth users.
> >
> > You see, you can't put special characters such as spaces, equals and
> > semicolons and such, into URLs, so if you *need* to include them in
> > arguments and such they are "escaped" by specifying as a hex value
> > prefixed by "=". Since "=" is used as the escape character, it must
> > itself appear, if part of an argument, as "=3D".
>
Greg Hill wrote:
> Special character encoding or escaping in URLs uses a % followed by two
> hex digits, rather than =. I think the original poster was asking about
> the encodings he sometimes sees in the message body of some emails,
> though, not about URLs.
>
Correct.
> I've also often wondered what prompts some software in the
> email chain to perform that encoding.
I'm guessing that the M$ client does it.
An aquaintance who admits that Outlook is crap and claims to
not use it, still sends me such garbage via his Win2000.
>The most extreme case I've ever seen was when I
> received an email from a friend who was then in Armenia. The message was
> written in Outlook (and likely originated through a Microsoft MTA), and
> the first part was written in English while the latter part was written in
> Armenian. The English part came through just fine (through Exim on
> Solaris, then read in pine) but the Armenian part was completely escaped.
> I suppose this was because she switched her keyboard to a non-English
> keymap, and one of the software tools just decided that it should escape
> everything. Maybe that was so that I wouldn't receive the bits and try to
> view them directly as the standard Arabic letters we use in English
> (because all I'd get is random meaningless gibberish with that
> interpretation of the bits). I never did persue it any more to figure out
> what prompted the conversion.
>
We accept that once you go outside ASCII you have these 'problems'.
And if you use a 'script' that writes from bottom to top that top-posting
is appropriate. What I can't find out is what Micro$loth users see if
I post them a "=3D".
== Chris Glur.
