ietf-822
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Re: Working Group Last Call: Mnemonic to Proposed Standard

1992-03-31 19:12:10
I would appreciate your offering a concise statement concerning the
scope of use for MNemonic.  What problem(s) does it solve and which ones
does it not solve?

My 2 cents:

It solves the interoperability problems within EUnet.

More generally:

It solves the interoperability of character sets.

You will always be able to unambigeously represent a message
with your equipment. It provides a fallback method, so eg
a Japanese would be able to use his own equipment and character sets
and still be able to represent eg. the letter | in my middle name,
which is not normally accessible to him. 

It somewhat solves readability  in the fallback, but this fallback
is more adequate for some languages than other. Eg. the Japanese
find the fallbachk for ideographic characters totally unaccepatble.
I think Danes can tolerate it. The Vietnamese have a better method
for their language. It is always a pain in the neck not to have
your own character set readily available on your equipment.

I also continue to be confused about its relationship to the emerging
ISO work, namely ISO 10646.  (This may well be due to my not having done
enough homework, but I keep thinking that I am not the only 822ext working
group member with an inadequate understanding of MNemonics uses and
limitations.

Mnemonics are closely aligned with 10646. Actually the I-D contains
the best public electronic data available of 10646, that I know of.
The data available in the I-D has been crosscheked electronically
with the 10646 2DIS source. I am a member (newcomer) of SC2/WG2, who has
produced 10646 (well some may say it was the Unicode consortium...)
Mnemonics have been addressed in SC2/WG2 and the WG was positive
about it, but said that it should rather be another WG who should 
work on it. The work is now being undertaken by SC22/WG20.

I see mnemonic as the bridge between the new world, 10646 and 
the old world with it myriads of character sets.
And email is probably the single application where interoperability
of character sets are mostly needed, this is why we see the requrements
and the solutions here first.

Dave

Keld