I don't feel like I'm up enough on MIME details to contriubte to the
debate on ietf-822 on handling multibyte characters. The case of mail
(and news) is one where the broadest interoperability, including
outside the IP Internet, is important.
However, people should note that Windows NT, which promises to be a
very widespread and influential operating system, uses fixed size 16
bit Unicode through out including file names. Before you know it
there are going to be *millions* of computers running NT. How is this
going to be handled in FTP, Telnet, etc.? I believe that the Internet
should start migrating from predominantly 8 bit byte US ASCII to fixed
size 16 Unicode in most of its protocols where character strings
occur.
Donald