Hello,
The previous posting on this issue was, in the most part, uninformed.
Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In the web site of "people and computers" (Anashim & Machshevim) I found
> this article (the 2nd one) about hebrew standards..
>
> http://194.90.9.173/tsol/ts.exe?tsurl=0.19.0.0.0
>
> Anyone knows about it? is someone plan to implement this on one of
> Linux/Unix mail clients??
The new standard (SI1904) is actually an revision of an existing standard
SI1904, which dates back to 1995.
The *old* standard specified both visual and implicit directionality
as acceptable; However, it indicated visual as preferred and left the
implementation of implicit (aka logical) directionality in E-Mail
somewhat open-ended.
E-Mail nowadays is not what it used to be. There is more to it than
72-byte-per-line-text-only. For one thing, the old SI1904 way (also
specified in RFC1555/6) didn't actually "catch" all that much (few
implementations, where most notable E-Mail clients never supported it).
For another thing, it has always been clear that implicit directionality is
infinitely superior to visual directionality, if you want to do more with
the text than just "spit it on screen in fixed len lines and nonprop fonts".
The new SI1904 revises the existing standard. First, it promotes the use
of Unicode directionality (implicit, open algorithm), and deprecates the
use of visual - although the latter must still be *accepted* by a conforming
UA. Second, it defines conformance requirements and backward compatability.
Third, it introduces UTF-8 (a Unicode derivative) as a recognizable character
encoding set. Forth, it better defines Hebrew in header fields. There are more
smaller changes, corrections and additions, of course.
Microsoft had actually no part in the decision to revise this standard.
They were extremely cooperative and gave a formal committment that
OE5 (their latest mail program) will be compliant with the coming
standard. There's no need to bash them for what they did right
(especially when there are so many other chances...).
About non-MS mail clients: There are some plans to do stuff (stay tuned),
but: can we see a show of hands? Who would be willing to help (i.e., code
- not whine) such an effort? My previous attempts to gather help for
converting Mozilla 5 were a complete failure...
Bye
Doron Shikmoni
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