Why no Cyrillic?

[Elizabeth J. Pyatt]

For the record, I generally recommend proper encoding for every 
application (Web, Photoshop, Flash, ....), but e-mail is still dicey. 
Unfortunately, I believe that ASCII (i.e. just the English alphabet) 
is still the only 100% (or at least 99.9%) guaranteed encoding, 
especially if an American audience is involved.

I have the capability to send UTF-8 mail (Cyrillic and anything else) 
through my university's server and I  can receive it as well.

Yet my Inbox is filled with a combination of properly formatted 
non-English e-mail along with those containing the gibberish that's a 
sign of encoding gone bad.  I am not sure what is happening, but a 
lot can go wrong  apparently.

It could be an intermediate routing server garbling encoding, or the 
sender could be specifying a font not found on everyone's system or 
the reader could be using a font missing the characters.

Or tech support may have installed an e-mail package which doesn't 
support the characters. In the U.S., a lot of instructors are unable 
to install fonts or change packages because their tech support locks 
them out of admin rights.

It can be a real challenge to explain what is needed and have tech 
support work on installing things in a Unicode friendly manner 
(patience is required on everyone's part).

So...it's not surprising that a lot of e-mail is sent in ASCII, even 
if it's not supposed to be.

Elizabeth

P.S. I often get  "advice"  from many speakers of languages of India 
on how to transcribe their languages into ASCII.
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
Penn State University
ejp10 at psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)

210 Rider Building  (formerly Rider II)
227 W. Beaver Avenue
State College, PA   16801-4819
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/psu
http://tlt.psu.edu

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