On a Japanese device, the text encoding is Shift-JIS. If the user's Hot
Sync name uses double-byte characters (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, or
Romaji), then there are a few potential problems with various
registration schemes:
1. If they email you the name, then you might receive it encoded as JIS,
not Shift-JIS.
2. If they email you the name in Shift-JIS, then an email gateway might
strip off the high bit of bytes, and you get garbled text.
3. If they email you the name in Shift-JIS, but the text isn't tagged
correctly (MIME charset), or your email app goes crazy when it gets an
unknown charset, then the text will get munged (this looks like what
happened with Robert's example).
4. If they entered ascii, but using full-width (double-byte) characters,
then even though they tell you the name is "PALMFAN" it could be any mix
of single and double-byte ascii characters.
5. Your registration code generator doesn't work correctly with high
ascii (values > 127), which means that Shift-JIS text also won't work.
6. You give the user the appropriate registration code, but they enter
all or some of the ascii characters using double-byte equivalents.
I can't think of any reason why the user would have to enter a "special"
version of the name via a web site form - that should just work,
assuming #5 isn't the problem.
-- Ken
