Dave -- Have you read Keld Simonsen's RFC-CHAR document? In it he
purports to describe all of the world's character sets (well, almost...)
and gives each a clear name. He has been advocating a simplification of
the XXXX stuff on character sets: basically, I believe he proposes that
we simply refer to his document for a definition of what a given
"charset" token means, and perhaps recommend a (very small) set of
"recommended" character sets for use in Internet mail. Would that be a
suitable resolution of this problem? It has the added (and highly
desirable, from my perspective) property that it would shorten the final
RFC-XXXX document. -- Nathaniel