In
<9302180937(_dot_)AA18947(_at_)necom830(_dot_)cc(_dot_)titech(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp>,
Masataka Ohta wrote:
[Erik had written:]
Lately I've been wondering if it would be OK to see Unicode itself as
corresponding to MIME's "text/plain", and to see an extended Unicode
(i.e. language tagging and/or font tagging) as corresponding to
"richtext" (or one of its successors).
Erik, it should be noted for you that NO Japanese plain text is written
in Chinese Han.
Using Chinese Han for Japanese is like removing diacritical marks from
Latin.
Unless I am badly mistaken, neither Unicode nor ISO-10646
specifies that Chinese Han glyphs are to be used for the "CJK
Ideographs." So it seems to me that if your preferred language
is, say, Japanese, and if most or all of the e-mail that you
receive is in Japanese, the thing to do is arrange for your
default mail-reading configuration to render Unicode/10646
ideographs using your preferred, Japanese font.
This approach may be insufficient if you regularly receive a
mixture of Japanese and Chinese text, or if there are frequent
quotations of one language within another, but it's well
established that those are harder problems which neither Unicode
nor the BMP (or whatever it's called) of 10646 are designed to
solve.
If we'd been doing this a few hundred years ago, I wonder if
Germans would be complaining that Unicode didn't have
black-letter characters?
Steve Summit
scs(_at_)eskimo(_dot_)com