I agree with Ran. A mnemonic system that deals only with kana is totally
useless.
This suggests that Ran and Mark believe that Mnemonic does not intend to
handle the glyphs of all the Japanese alphabets. I have the clear impression
that Keld intends Mnemonic to handle _all_ known glyphs. Perhaps Keld
can enlighten us on this. It certainly makes a difference to the Header
proposal.
If you want to represent Japanese in ASCII, you use old-fashioned
romanization. If you want to represent Japanese in the proper characters, you
use ISO-2022 to encode JIS. This is a clean dichotomy. Mnemonic for Japanese
makes about as much sense as bicycles for fish.
The way I read this it suggests that the Japanese don't just want their
glyphs to be transported, they want them transported in suitably
Japanesey bit patterns. Since that doesn't make sense I'm obviously
missing something again. Sorry I just didn't get the technical and
practical interpretation of the bicycles and fish analogy.
Bob Smart