Wolf Eichler wrote:
> But how come I receive messages from all around encoded in iso-8859-1,
> containing the Euro-char in quoted-printable "=80". And it depicts
> well. Can there be encoding in iso-8859-1 that does not belong to
> iso-8859-1?
1. Quoted-printable just allows you to say "I want char 165 here" -
that's all. We do that without QP and with 8 bit characters by
default. It doesn't matter, because it says nothing about which
character that is.
2. That's what the chatset is for. The ISO-8859-15 charset says
"character 165 (for example) is the Euro symbol" and and
ISO-8859-1 says "character 128 (your 0x80) is unspecified".
3. Unicode says "unicode-character 4187 (for example) is the Euro
symbol" and "unicode-character 128 is unspecified".
4. The font then says "unicode-character 4187 looks like that
(imagine picture of the Euro symbol)" and your Windows Courier New
might say "unicode-character 128 looks like that (imagine picture
of the Euro smybol)", but my font might say "I don't know anything
about how unicode-character 128 looks like", because it is
unspecified.
It seems like
* Mozilla on Windows pics the unicode-character with the same
number, if the charset doesn't specify, what a certain character means
* some other clients happen to encode it the Euro symbol the other
way around.
* Your font has an image for the Euro symbol for unicode-character
128, although it is unspecified.
At least, that's how I understood it - please correct me, if I'm wrong.
You see, how much uncertainty is involved? Just use the standard, and
you have a much greater chance for it to work, and for you to still be
able to read it in 10 years. (Some people do care about that.) And it
will same a lot of other mess that's typically involved with "ad-hoc
standards".
[1] <http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt>
