John, I'm trying not to get on your nerves, but can you give us an
example of an Asian character where the rendering in some font would
lead to a "loss of information"?
Erik, it's not font issue.
The Unicode Han characters are printed using slightly different glyphs
in the typical CJK printing styles. "Different glyphs" means
"different fonts", but "different glyphs" does not necessarily mean
"different characters".
If you don't want to use Unicode without language and/or font info,
then don't use it. Use whatever tags you want to. But please don't
try to force other people to use tags.
That you can transliterate something without "loss of information"
has nothing to do with the character code issues.
You can use the ASCII character code to transliterate e.g. Kyushu,
and, although there is clearly "loss of information", not very much
info has been lost. Such transliterations are quite usable,
particularly in a forum such as this, where we cannot expect very many
people to be able to display real Japanese on their screens.
Japanse script may be printed in various font: Minchou, Gothic, Ryumin
etc. But, no Japanese script is printed with Chinese Han.
I have never seen Japanese *printed* (on paper) using a Chinese font.
But we're talking about *email* here, not printing. I *have* seen
Chinese email displayed in a Japanese font. It was quite readable.
but I will remind them that PCs and other
personal computing devices are getting more powerful and cheaper, and
the majority of good operating system software originates in the US.
That's why we should not be clippled with 16 bit code.
We're *not* limited to a 16-bit code. We *can* use a wider unit, e.g.
32 bits, in order to add tags. Or we can use "stateful" methods
similar to ISO 2022 for font tagging and/or language tagging.
But we don't *have* to use such tags. There is no way whatsoever that
you can stop me from sending Unicode email without lang and font info.
Whether I can expect the receiver(s) to be able to display and read it
is another matter entirely (and more interesting, in my view).
Erik