Jim -
The problem is that Keld et al are threatening a filibuster against MIME
to force mnemonic into MIME without proper IESG sanction. It would be one
thing if he insisted that ISO-2022-JP should also be in there, but he doesn't.
It is not just Euro-centricity. Euro-centricity is mnemonic. Mnemonic
assists with European languages and does a lousy job otherwise. But, as a
piece of the pie, it may be alright.
Frankly, in the field of international data processing, it is far more
important to be able to correctly transmit Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic,
Hebrew, Sanskrit, ... than it is to put slashes through o's in Danish.
Mnemonic as it presently is constituted is suitable only for European
languages, and specifically only for those European scripts which use glyphs
outside of the 52 upper and lower case Roman letters. It does not
satisfactorily represent CJK scripts; it is substantially inferior to the
traditional romanization of those scripts. The use and utility of mnemonic is
limited to Europe and to those who deal with the European scripts which use
those characters.
Mnemonic is *NOT* of such general utility that IESG rules for citations
should be waived. Mnemonic is *NOT* of such general utility that all MIME
implementers worldwide should be required to implement it, regardless of the
target user base.
Unfortunate, that is what Keld et al are demanding. They are demanding
that mnemonic be given a special status over and above anything else, by being
an intrinsic part of MIME. The stated purpose for this is to require that all
MIME implementations support mnemonic. Not `all MIME implementations support
multi-national character sets.'
What does this `support' mean? MIME has requirements for character sets
`at least to the extent of being abl4e to inform the user about what character
set the message uses', and to `recognize ISO-8859-* character sets to the
extent of being able to display those characters that are common to ISO-8859-*
and US-ASCII.' Unrecognized subtypes are to be `show[n as] the "raw" version
of the data.'
Keld et al seem to find this unacceptable. They want more. I am at a
loss to interpret what they want as anything other than full support for all
European languages in all MIME implementations thorough the mnemonic
mechanism.
Nowhere in this is a demand that East Asian or any other non-European
scripts be supported in all MIME implementations. In other words, these
Europeans are stating that European scripts are important enough that their
scripts must be included in all implementations, but non-European scripts are
not important. That is a racist attitude.