Mnemonic is NOT a general solution. It only handles alphabetic
languages and leaves the ideogrammatic languages out in the cold.
That limitation of mnemonic probably cannot be helped, but the use of
Real-* headers is the more general solution, is not Euro-centric, and
works world-wide. Let's try to think globally here and solve the
general problem for all users.
% Oh, well, mnemonic is general, with support defined for the Chinese,
% Japanese and Korean characters in the design, and I do have
% the 5 CJK 16 bit character sets tabled, but these are not yet
% in RFC-CHAR - and I do not support it in the current implementation.
%
% So mnemonic could be used technically with reasonable results also
% on CJK.
I disagree that "reasonable results" are possible with Chinese
and similar languages; please let me explain.
In the case of alphabetic/Romanised languages the mnemonic encoding
is mostly visually decipherable by someone even if his MUA doesn't
display it properly and the recipient isn't familiar with the RFC-MNEM.
This is NOT the case with Chinese (for example). I read Chinese,
wrote a thesis on Chinese/Japanese-language computing technology, and
am quite confident that there is no alphabetic representation for a
Chinese character that will be visually deciperable by someone who
lacks a copy of RFC-MNEM in front of him/her. One would need to have
some kind of printed look-up table between Mnemonic and the printer
character; even if the look-up table were at hand, it is MUCH less
useful than it would be for an alphabetic language. I suspect that
similar problems arise with Arabic, but I don't know Arabic myself,
so I'm not entirely sure.
In short, mnemonic encoding is useful for alphabetic languages
PRIMARILY because of the ease with which someone lacking an enhanced
MUA can figure out the real letters intended. This feature does NOT
carry over to non-alphabetic languages. I don't see a general
solution to this deficiency and clearly there will be cases where
mnemonic fits the bill quite nicely. However, it is NOT a general
world-wide solution and should not be represented as such.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil