Re: evolution and hebrew

Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

> éëåìéí ì÷áì áãåàø úåëï á÷éãåã ISO-8859-8. áäçìè ééúëï ùäåà éäéä òáøéú
>  ååéæåàìéú. ìà öøéê ìäéåú éåúø îãé çëîéí ëàï.

Yes, sending Hebrew characters in visual order is possible. The point 
was that at least for email sent as Content-Type: text/plain, receiving 
mail in visual order is much less common than receiving mail in logical 
order which is labeled incorrectly with charset=ISO-8859-8. If the 
client's goal is to display messages in a way that's most useful for the 
user, it should treat this header as indicating logical order, despite 
the standard (or do something smarter, see below).

As for email sent as Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-8, I
simply don't know whether it's more common to receive visual or logical
order, what the magnitudes are, and whether there's a difference between
mail sent as attachments or as part of the message. So I don't know what
would be the desired client behavior.

For the record, in Mozilla 1.6, Tzafrir's attachment (Content-Type:
text/html; charset=ISO-8859-8) is displayed in logical order inline, and
in visual order in the browser window. So it appears that Mozilla
decided to treat *all* charset=ISO-8859-8 declarations as erroneous for
the purpose of displaying mail, without further analysis.

Incidentally, since we're in the business of (talking about) correcting
bad headers, I believe we can do much better than debate whether a
particular header should be interpreted as indicating visual or logical
order. I haven't tried it myself, but I bet a simple bigram analysis can
determine with a very high degree of confidence whether a string of
Hebrew characters is in visual or logical order. This is what a really
useful client should do -- look at the text itself and figure out what
the order is.

-Ron.

P.S. I changed the language of this thread to English because I believe
the Ivrix list is also read by developers who do not speak Hebrew. My
apologies to the Hebrew speakers who are less comfortable with English.

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