Randall,
I agree (more or less) with most of what you said.
However, in the following, it is not clear (to me) what you are
proposing.
7) It isn't clear to me that "quoted printable" is useful for many
non-European languages because many glyphs cannot be usefully
represented using strings of US ASCII. I'm not sure that this is
fixable, but I'm concerned that we not end up being Euro-centric.
We should in fact try to address the non-European concerns
(Chinese, etc.) as well.
As far as mainland China itself is concerned, I'm not sure we have
much of a problem to solve, since they do not have very extensive
networks.
Taiwanese colleagues have told me that nearly all of their current
email is just ASCII. They are planning to use their CNS 11643 pages
together with ISO 2022 in an experimental setup at III. (Maybe it has
already started.)
In Korea, they are using 8-bit codes in PC-based email (i.e. the PCs
talk to a central host through a modem). They sometimes use their
N-byte encoding with ISO-2022-like shift-in and -out, but much of
their Unix mail is just ASCII.
In Japan, the story is of course very different. Email and netnews is
well established, and we use a 7-bit form of ISO 2022 (on JUNET and
WIDE).
So, what should we do about all this?
Regards,
EvdP