If that is true, then the critical question is whether language tagging
(at body-part level) provides enough information to be worth the
trouble, or whether that should be forced into markup ("within
body-part") as well.
I think we have seen very convincing arguments that senders providing
this type of information to receiving UAs is likely to be desirable in
many cases. I don't think we have seen an adequately strong argument
for requiring it, i.e., including it as profile information in the
charset name, although we have gotten close.
Sorry, but I beg to differ. In my opinion, language info is far from
being "required". If I send you some email in ASCII, do I have to
tell you what language I'm using in that note? I think not. You can
probably tell just by looking at it.
If I use some non-English words, I might tell you what language they
are in. I might say, "In Japanese, this is called Kanji" (i.e.
explicit, natural language tagging of the language). Or, if I knew
you had software that could handle it, I might send you a series of
bits that indicated that the language of the following bits was
Japanese.
But I don't think I'm *required* to include language info.
No, the sender should not be encouraged to include font info. The
sender should be reminded of the fact that the receiver may have a
preferred way of looking at the text. The sender should be told that
font info is allowed, but not always desirable. (My opinion.)
I think this reads a bit differently when "character set" is substituted
for "font".
That's putting it mildly! :-)
If a sender sometimes uses ISO 8859-1 and sometimes uses ISO 8859-2,
then he had darn well better include info indicating which one he was
using in a particular piece of text.
But there is a *huge* difference between character encoding info and
font info. You can communicate without one but not without the other.
Anyone for Content-Language: ? Would that, with the "not required, but
encouraged when it is important" solve enough of this problem that we
can get on with our lives?
I wouldn't mind at all if we added this to MIME or to any other
standards track or non-standards track document. Whether I would use
such a header in my messages is another matter entirely.
Regards,
Erik