Nathaniel says:
I have to agree with this. One of the simplifications I would like to
see in the next version of richtext is the elmination of all character
set switching inside richtext. Since richtext can use a charset
parameter, you can always use a multipart with several richtext entities
to get the same effect as character set switching inside richtext, and
with less complexity.
This doesn't achieve the same effect, since it would enforce character
set switching at the object level rather than on the character level. In
general MIME has this problem. For example, you have an andrew object
that includes an image as a "glyph" in the middle of your paragraph. When
you convert to a multipart message you have a text passage, an image, and
another text passage and no information that this was originally a single
paragraph.
However, the vast majority of use will probably be use of a single character
set throughout a message, so this probably won't hurt too much. But it is
a change in functionality.
Terry