John,
I take your point. Further, I am now stating the 'cleanliness' argument
about XXXX, as not having anything to do with headers, only as the late
stage of a continuing discussion. The WG and the spec have gone through
changes, as such processes often do. Only in recent months has it
become clear, to me at least, that separating out the header issues,
from the content issues, is essential. (Although, quite awhile ago,
I did generally lobby for 'divide and conquor'.)
Specifically, I do NOT see any of the character-set related issues
as secondary or as being dealt with surreptitiously (e.g., by being
'smuggled' into XXXX). The strength of my language, in the last couple
of messages, is to try to get the position clearly stated, and directly
dealt with.
It is very, very difficult to back off from important topics, but
responsible project management requires doing just that, if staying with
a topic is likely to threaten the entire project. For RFC XXXX, I
believe it is absolutely essential to back off from all aspects of
the characterset/language issues, except for providing the basic
extensibility mechanism that will allow later specs a point of
'entry'.
Dave