4 ms·

Amusingly enough, Joel's company does not follow Joel's preaching. I tried to convince Fog Creek to abandon the obsolete, non-standard and proprietary 8-bit Wi

by jwr 15y ago

Amusingly enough, Joel's company does not follow Joel's preaching. I tried to convince Fog Creek to abandon the obsolete, non-standard and proprietary 8-bit Windows-CP1252 character encoding in the E-mails that FogBugz sends. They refused, reason given: "joelonsoftware.com is a blog. Fog Creek Software is a business."

spolsky 15y ago
Not sure what you're talking about; FogBugz sends UTF-8 email.
- solutionyogi 15y ago
  I just looked at my FogBugz email from today morning, it is indeed using CP1252 character set. See: http://i.imgur.com/nV3V6.png http://i.imgur.com/nV3V6.png I think this could be because you use messagelabs.com to send out the emails.
  - spolsky 15y ago
    weird. I'll check into that. It used to be UTF-8.
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    It sends CP1252 emails if all the characters used fit. If they don't, it uses UTF8. That way, people with old mailers can still read them (more realistically, people reading the raw email can read them out of the database or from traffic dumps), because .NET has a tendency to base64 encode the body the instant you set charset to UTF8, and I don't unbase64 in my head. Try including the funny character of your choice in an email. It should show up just fine.
    - solutionyogi 15y ago
      You are right. I created another test case with Chinese character and the email is now UTF-8. See: http://i.imgur.com/LeaX8.png http://i.imgur.com/LeaX8.png I think this is a very good compromise.
- jwr 15y ago
  I'm talking about this: Received: from mxny1.fogcreek.com (mxp11.fogcreek.com [64.34.80.172]) by […] Received: from hbny4 (hbny4.fogcreek.local [10.2.0.48]) by mxny1.fogcreek.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2386295B33 for […]; Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:18:45 -0500 (EST) Priority: normal Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1250 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <20120111001845.2386295B33@mxny1.fogcreek.com>
astine 15y ago
I'd like to know what they mean by that. Are they saying that Joel's blog is merely his opinion and that business is not directly subject to his whims and opinions, or are they saying that the advice only applies to blogs and non-serious things while businesses have other priorities?
tedunangst 15y ago
FWIW, CP1252 was picked as a kind of super-ascii (or super iso-8859-1, if you prefer, it's almost a strict superset). I'm not aware of any encoding aware software that is unable to process CP1252.
- flomo 15y ago
  And HTML5 actually requires "ISO 8859-1" to be interpreted as Windows-1252. (Some old Mac/Linux browsers resisted doing so and would show 'moronic' private 1252 characters as missing characters, even if a correct font was installed.)
amalag 15y ago
What is Joel preaching? To use UTF-8? I don't think so. This post is explaining the difference between character sets and encoding. It was very helpful for me.

by jwr 15y ago

spolsky 15y ago

Not sure what you're talking about; FogBugz sends UTF-8 email.

solutionyogi 15y ago
I just looked at my FogBugz email from today morning, it is indeed using CP1252 character set. See: http://i.imgur.com/nV3V6.png http://i.imgur.com/nV3V6.png I think this could be because you use messagelabs.com to send out the emails.
- spolsky 15y ago
  weird. I'll check into that. It used to be UTF-8.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  It sends CP1252 emails if all the characters used fit. If they don't, it uses UTF8. That way, people with old mailers can still read them (more realistically, people reading the raw email can read them out of the database or from traffic dumps), because .NET has a tendency to base64 encode the body the instant you set charset to UTF8, and I don't unbase64 in my head. Try including the funny character of your choice in an email. It should show up just fine.
  - solutionyogi 15y ago
    You are right. I created another test case with Chinese character and the email is now UTF-8. See: http://i.imgur.com/LeaX8.png http://i.imgur.com/LeaX8.png I think this is a very good compromise.
jwr 15y ago
I'm talking about this: Received: from mxny1.fogcreek.com (mxp11.fogcreek.com [64.34.80.172]) by […] Received: from hbny4 (hbny4.fogcreek.local [10.2.0.48]) by mxny1.fogcreek.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2386295B33 for […]; Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:18:45 -0500 (EST) Priority: normal Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1250 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <20120111001845.2386295B33@mxny1.fogcreek.com>

astine 15y ago

I'd like to know what they mean by that. Are they saying that Joel's blog is merely his opinion and that business is not directly subject to his whims and opinions, or are they saying that the advice only applies to blogs and non-serious things while businesses have other priorities?

tedunangst 15y ago

FWIW, CP1252 was picked as a kind of super-ascii (or super iso-8859-1, if you prefer, it's almost a strict superset). I'm not aware of any encoding aware software that is unable to process CP1252.

flomo 15y ago
And HTML5 actually requires "ISO 8859-1" to be interpreted as Windows-1252. (Some old Mac/Linux browsers resisted doing so and would show 'moronic' private 1252 characters as missing characters, even if a correct font was installed.)

amalag 15y ago

What is Joel preaching? To use UTF-8? I don't think so. This post is explaining the difference between character sets and encoding. It was very helpful for me.