ietf-822
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Re: new-ish idea on non-ascii headers

1991-09-22 10:15:41
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