[JDEV] Non english messages problem (solution)

[Alexander Tsvyashchenko]

Hello, "wil at home" <wil at dready.org>!

AFAIK ICQ doesn't support encoding information.
But I think Hackee is right proposing "right click on the ICQ agent, and set preferred encoding".
  For first, it seems in most cases user will know encoding for all incoming/outgoing messages from ICQ (for example, all russian/ukrainian users use cp1251 encoding in ICQ messages).
  For second: how are You imaging process of "setting encoding individually for every message"? ICQ transport receives an ICQ message for me. ICQ transport should convert it to unicode and send to the client. How can it know what encoding incoming message has? I see only one realistic way to handle this: set assumed encoding for ICQ transport by user for all messages. Of course, second way is to encode this message just as sequence of bytes and send to client to let client handle encoding of this message. Then Your proposition (setting encoding for every message individually) will work, but as I understand this way will break general idea of jabber: equality of handling of all messages by client without relation to the transport.
  With outgoing messages situation is simplier (it's possible to add extra tag to the message with desired outgoing encoding), but this also will somewhat break uniformity of handling messages.
  So I think that setting assumed encoding for ICQ transport for all incoming/outgoing messages is the best and the easiest way. There is only one problem: is anyone going to implement this?

--
	Good luck!                                     Alexander.

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001 01:39:07 +0800
"wil at home" <wil at dready.org> wrote:

WAH> We have encountered similar problems with non i18n aware applications, esp.
WAH> interoperability between applications who use different encodings.
WAH> 
WAH> I don't know much about the ICQ protocol, maybe someone could point out if
WAH> it does send encoding information.  Working on the assumption that ICQ does
WAH> not support it, then messages would of course be treated as iso8859-1 (or
WAH> rather most apps will not even care, these days we're luckier because
WAH> programmers don't strip the 8th bit of a characters).
WAH> 
WAH> Hackee brought out an interesting workaround, which is to do allow the users
WAH> to select the encoding at the application level, since you can't do it at
WAH> the protocol level due to missing encoding information.  However, I disagree
WAH> with him to "right click on the ICQ agent, and set preferred encoding".  It
WAH> should be done at individual message level, that is when viewing / composing
WAH> a message, you select the encoding that this message should be viewed in /
WAH> converted to for sending.
WAH> 
WAH> This is similar to the browsers / email clients.  When a html page does not
WAH> contain the encoding tag, IE would use the default encoding, but user can
WAH> override the encoding using the "View->Encoding" menu.
WAH> 
WAH> wil
WAH>