John writes:
(i) Mnemonic is much better adapted to the character sets that
reflect languages that have a relatively small repertiore of alphabetic
or phonetic characters than it is to languages with, e.g., potentially
unbounded collections of ideographic characters.
Well, I and others are working on this, giving quite good names for
Chinese and other characters. Then this would even be a help to
East-asian and other peolpe (like westeners).
(ii) However mnemonic is expanded, and no matter what character
collections are registered, there will always be "one more character
set" that it does not accomodate today, even if it might accomodate it
tomorrow. Unless we are going to tell people to not use those character
sets (tempting, indeed), we will always need an escape mechanism that
depends on a pairing of character set identification and recoding of the
bit patterns (e.g., quoted-printable) to supplement a system that
depends on a glyph registry (e.g., mnemonic).
This is actually one of the good features of mnemonic, it
is borne upwards compatible! If there is a character that you do not
have - or do not *know* because it was not defined at the time
of your implementation - there are procedures for displaying - or
generating the character anyway!
Keld