2011/10/8 Andreas Prilop <[email protected]>: > On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Gerrit wrote: > >> So if somebody from Google reads this, >> [...] >> Additionally, if the standard Android web browser could then >> use the html “lang” tag to select the appropriate font, >> it would be even nicer. > > Mark Davis from Google has confessed on this list > http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2010-m01/0273.html > that Google deliberately ignores both the LANG attribute of HTML > and the CHARSET parameter of MIME. > > -- > The schoolboys from Google failed again: > http://groups.google.com/group/fr.test/browse_thread/thread/8ad6f1e8fbfefaec
There's no problem with this strategy if it really helps more users than it hurts them, because of incorrect settings in the original HTML or CHARSET parameter of MIME headers coming from the sender. I must admit that it's now very rare to see messages incorrectly decoded. But as such autodetection can fail quite often (it is only defined as an heuristic, not as a definitive algorithm), Gmail is still not allowing the recipients to change the way the emails have been autodetected. If possible, Gmail should allow users to change the result of the autodetection, and it should also remember this override the next time the same mail will be viewed again (I see absolutely no reason why Gmail cannot remember this manual override, given that Gmail can already add arbitrary leading MIME headers on received messages, it can as well insert the user choice as a top MIME header kept with the message in the user mailbox... and could as well learn from the manual overrides made by a user, to also help feeding the personal autodetector with user preference data...) The menu option "Display original" in Gmail is still not convenient enough, as you cannot work with attachments reliably, notably for HTML-formatted emails (sent as multipart MIME messages containing binary base-64 encoded images for example), and it absolutely does not allow redecoding the message in another way and read it directly online (for example it won't work on my smartphone where you can't easily save the message to reedit it immediately or use other tools).
