Yes, that is true, but that does not give use mandatory minimal
support for this EUnet standard. That is, conforming MIME applications
may chose to reject standard EUnet mail.
MIME currently says things like:
Appendix A -- Minimal MIME-Conformance
...
-- Recognize other character sets at
least to the extent of being able
to inform the user about what
character set the message uses.
-- For unrecognized subtypes, show or
offer to show the user the "raw"
version of the data.
Perhaps the first paragraph above could be changed a little to say
that the text must be shown to the user in "raw" form (as in the
second paragraph). Would this satisfy you?
But I guess other people would complain that ESCapes might cause
problems, etc. So we'd probably have to change that a bit. How about
saying that the text must be shown to the user as ASCII if it doesn't
contain control characters other than CR, LF and a few others?
It is possible that some Japanese (or Mark) would complain about this,
but I'd reply that UAs can be told to allow ESCs by the user.
3. products following the spec has been in production use for more
than 2 years (iso-2022-jp has this quality too).
4. It is the only spec that preserves interoperability of internet mail,
in fact MIME destroys internet interoperability.
5. It is adopted by a large internet community (EUnet) as its standard.
(iso-2022-jp also has this quality).
You are giving the JUNET encoding a very bad name by comparing it with
"mnemonic". The JUNET encoding actually works. It is used in large
volumes, day by day, among many people, in Japan.
The "mnemonic" encoding, on the other hand, has been installed at a
few EUnet sites for 2 years, but apparently there are people that
don't use it, and there are interoperability problems in certain parts
of EUnet. Why, just the other day, yesterday I believe, there was a
fellow from Denmark complaining that the lack of interoperability was
adversely affecting their culture. Wait, hold on! Your email address
is the same as his: keld(_at_)dkuug(_dot_)dk(_dot_) Are you two the same person?
Cheers,
Erik