Why no Cyrillic?

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Christopher, Tim wrote:

> I am sure you guys know this......but..when I first started learning 
> Russian, sometimes the emails would be garbled when I received them.
> I soon learned to use the "view" button on my browser and go to 
> "encoding" and there I found different versions that would ungarble 
> the email and it was then readable. The options under encoding were :
> 
> Cyrillic DOS
> Cyrillic ISO
> Cyrillic KOI8-R
> Cyrillic KOI8-U
> Cyrillic WINDOWS
> 
> One of these should encode the email properly. Hope that helps some.

Some email programs even read the sender's email header and obey 
instructions. For example, your header said:
	Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
so Mozilla displayed it in Western (ISO-8859-1) without any user input.

Occasionally the sender will lie (intentionally or inadvertently), and 
then I have to switch encoding, but that's pretty rare these days. What 
is not rare is when a user has his/her email program set up to always 
always always send in Western no matter what, and that often turns 
Cyrillic to unrecoverable question marks.

The worst offenders (on the sending side) are webmails, because many 
American webmasters make no provision (or make it hard to find their 
provision) for switching encoding, so users are forced to send in 
Western willy-nilly; they don't even have the option of Unicode.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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