Re: evolution and hebrew

On Friday, September 30 2005 11:40, Ron Artstein wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> > Again:
> >
> > There is exactly one buggy mailer that sends ISO-8859-8 as
> > logical Hebrew: Evolution. Fix that.
>
> Again: as a user, I don't care what mailer my correspondents use
> and if and when that mailer gets its bugs fixed. I want *my* client
> to display the mail in a way that I can read it. If incoming mail
> is readable in one client and unreadable in another, I'll use the
> former.
>
[...]
>
> I wouldn't call this bending the standard, but rather dealing with
> noisy input. I also don't accept the pedagogical argument. In my
> opinion, the reasons for adhering to standards in *interpreting*
> text have to do with efficiency, ease of maintenance, time and
> money. The price of strict adherence is usability, given the noisy
> world out there.
>

Now this, I can't agree with. This is exactly the sort of reasoning that led 
to the sorry state of HTML on the Web in the late 90's. You start out with 
lenient interpretation in one common client, then people like Ron claim the 
other clients are buggy when they refuse to implement the same leniency, then 
other clients succumb and introduce their own -- noncompatible -- "allowed 
deviations" from the standard, and before you know it, the standard has been 
completely botched in practice, and automated processing is painful if at all 
possible.

There is a sort of "prisoner's dilemma" here -- It may appear as leniency is 
more useful, if you only consider the short range. This is wrong. The correct 
handling of noisy input is to make life harder on the people who produce it 
(and I don't know how to do that except through the people they communicate 
with).

Shai.
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