>> There is no curly quote in ISO-8859-1. It is not valid ISO-8859-1. There
>> are Macintosh and Windows extensions to ISO-8859-1 which are not compatible
>> with one another, as I explained.
>
> Thanks for the clarification - I suspected the fault was on the sender's
> side.
That's where this part comes into play:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
This
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
as Dan said, doesn't have the curly single apostrophe.
Quoted-printable encoding is an "evolved" pseudo-standard. It used to mean
"encode non-printable characters in a manner whose meaning is mostly evident
to a human reader and which you can decode if you receive it yourself".
A curly single apostrophe is visually identical to a comma...other than its
vertical displacement. So it was a fairly reasonable mapping...in its day.
I'm not really sure that the definition has been made any more rigorous.
> I do understand that the Mac and Windows systems use their own native
> encoding, but I expect that a mailer would translate to an appropriate
> standard character set correctly (such as ISO-8859-1 or Unicode). Entourage
> seems to do this correctly - thanks to Dan and the rest of the team - but I
> notice that most Windows tools do not handle this correctly.
If and only if the mail client in question actually handles Unicode.
Unicode is relatively new and is a fairly high end feature. It's hard to do
correctly.
ISO-8859-1 is kind of the lowest common denominator.
> I wonder how many business men (besides the ones I know about) have lost
> contracts with potential customers in Japan and China not realizing that
> their Windows system encoded the combination 's as the character meaning
> foolish or stupid and insulted the persons they were trying to persuade to
> purchase their product....
Now that is an unfortunate translation... But, in some ways a
self-fulfilling characterization. ;-)
Summary: The encoding isn't technically "wrong" and thus there's not really
any "fault".
mikel
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