I'm busy trying to incorporate the Santa Fe decisions into the draft,
and I have come up against one that I think is a tad silly.
In Santa Fe, I think we decided that a charset of MNEMONIC means
mnemonic with a base set of US-ASCII and a quoting character of &. We
also established a convention for specifying otherwise, e.g.
"MNEMONIC+ISO-10646+64" would mean MNEMONIC using ISO-10646 as the base
charset and @ as the quoting character.
Upon reflection, I think that it is a mistake to provide the latter
escape valve. The only value of it is that it means that software
targeting another charset can avoid immediately switching charsets at
the start of a message. The drawback is that it constitutes a huge
violation of our basic goal of keeping the number of "charset" values
small. I think that eliminating this is a big gain for little pain.
Can't we just say that, as used in mail, MNEMONIC always starts out with
a standard base character set and a standard quoting character? Is it
really that much easier to say "MNEMONIC+ISO-10646+64" than to say
"MNEMONIC" and put a charset change at the start of the message body?