On 05/05/2015 04:32, Keith F. Lynch wrote: [someone else -- Bill Gosper, I think:]
Fix the digest.
[Keith:]
Are you volunteering? It's not obvious what the right thing to do is. Simply transmitting the raw bit patterns is no better than replacing them with question marks, since without the headers saying which encoding is in use, gibberish will probably result. ... Another approach would be to translate the encodings. But what if the source encoding contains characters that can't be represented in the destination encoding?
If the destination encoding is something that represents the full Unicode repertoire (UTF-8 would be the obvious candidate) then that is not likely to happen. The actual difficulty here is that in some cases it will be hard to tell what the source encoding actually was.
The simplest approach, assuming senders are unwilling or unable to stop sending non-ASCII, would be to shut down the digest and force everyone to subscribe to one message at a time.
That seems less simple and obviously worse than just keeping things as they are. (I do not claim that keeping things as they are is the best option.)
I won't mention the fact that this quoting is invariably in reverse order, since that doesn't affect the message size, merely the readability.
The quoting isn't inevitably in reverse order; for instance, in this very discussion both you and I have quoted other people without reversing the order.
Also, lots of people send the body of their message -- including quoted text -- twice in each message, the second time in bloated HTML encoding, as if email were a web page.
No: as if HTML is able to represent simple typographical markup like italics and boldface and colour, and as if some people want those things in their email messages as they do in their web pages, printed documents, handwritten letters, etc. If you receive 100 email messages a day with 10kB of bloat each then every year the bloat costs you about 1MB of disc space (ignoring the possibility of compression -- redundant bloaty stuff compresses well). If you store them on a spinning-rust hard drive, that will cost you about 0.004 cents per year. If you store them on a fancy high-end SSD, it might be more like 0.1 cents per year. Maybe 0.2 cents per year, if you want the absolute fastest gold-plated random access to your email archive. You may well have a bigger volume of email than that, but if it's *much* bigger then I betcha the biggest contributors to its volume are not messages that could have been plain text but have been sent as HTML, but (1) messages that could have been plain text but have been sent as (say) Microsoft Word documents, and (2) messages with large attachments -- e.g., photographs or (hopefully non-malicious) computer software. These may be a blessing or a curse or both, but they have nothing to do with the merits of the math-fun digest. -- g