The problem with these mnemonics is that CJK people would
rather see the 2022 encoded real character on the screeen than
such a mnemonic.
Saying this is a problem was not good PR! In fact showing the real
character is still what is meant to happen. Right! No display software
for Mnemonic is meant to show the encoded form: that is just a
last ditch fall-back position.
Now the problem at the moment is that there is Japanese software
(and maybe even hardware) to handle 2022, and it doesn't (yet) handle
Mnemonic. However since both are based on numeric location in
pages of characters it should be a very simple algorithm to convert
between the Mnemonic and 2022. Even if an algorithmic conversion
is not possible, a table-driven one must be easy.
Mnemonic doesn't have the same advantages for the Japanese that it
has for European languages, but it still has the nice property of
being a 7-bit universal character set which won't drive your terminal
to do funny things if you happen to display the encoded form. This is
worth a lot. It at least means that you can easily combine Japanese
with a touch of Cyrillic and a bit of Vietnamese.
I simply can't understand the concerns of our Japanese speaking
people on the list. Whatever header mechanism is chosen you are going
to have to do some programming to get the right glyphs out. I just
can't see that putting in code to understand Mnemonic is so much
harder than hunting around the headers to find the encoded variable.
I think that the code to understand Mnemonic is going to be in the
mail software for new mail readers and writers anyway. Obviously that
is the hope/expectation/intention of the Mnemonic header proposal.
Bob Smart