A severe additional problem with the mnemonic proposal (besides its
western-centricity) is this.
% See Keld's comments. Mnemonic can be made to support as many character sets
% as you like. Mnemonic is therefore not western-centric, and it is definitely
% less western-centric than are many other things (e.g. the use of English
% in header tags, restrictions on the local-part of addresses, etc.)
% that we don't plan to fix.
NO.
Keld has NOT given any examples to this list of how his mnemonic
encoding for Chinese characters (for example) has the same benefits
for Chinese users as the mnemonic encoding does for users of western
European languages. I assert that the fundamental nature of ideographic
languages makes this essentially impossible.
Moreover, the current standard tends to be US-centric and not
"western-centric" --- and moreover, the US-centric nature is inherent
in the ISO definition of the "invariant code set." Yes, it is a problem
but let's characterise it correctly.
It seems clear to me that this working group lacks consensus on how to
handle "extended headers" properly and I now tend to agree with those who
suggest not addressing "extended headers" in RFC-XXXX. Instead it
should be addressed separately and given the attention that the problem
deserves rather than being done in haste or unduly slowing down the other
parts of RFC-XXXX where there is much more consensus.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil