In <731604373(_dot_)826006(_dot_)KLENSIN(_at_)INFOODS(_dot_)UNU(_dot_)EDU>,
John wrote:
[I had written:]
1. What percentage of e-mail messages will require full
multilingual capabilities, and
I think the answers are "high" ...
I don't believe it...
Urk. I don't believe it, either. I managed to mis-answer my own
question; I actually meant "low." I won't argue, however, with
Nathaniel's suggestion that the percentage of truly multilingual
e-mail in some countries may be much higher.
[On whether the language tag should permit a list:]
But suppose I am sending a message that is mixed English and Russian,
mostly the latter. Cyrillic isn't unified with Roman in either 10646 or
in 8859-5. But, if I am forced to "one language", I either have to lie
and say "English" to get the disambiguations of your example, or I have
to say "Russian" and lose all of those disambiguations (although not
the ability to differentiate between Russian and other Cyrillic-using
Slavic languages, perhaps).
An even better example, which occurred to me after I had sent my
note yesterday, would be a message which contained both English
and Japanese: language-based distinctions based on each language
could be unambiguously applied to the Latin and Han characters,
respectively, in the message.
I withdraw my objection to permitting a list of languages.
(In the general case, permitting a list is often a good idea,
anyway). We should make sure, however, that the description
emphasizes the fact that text/plain messages with tags like
"English,German" or "Japanese,Chinese" are probably *not* going
to be disambiguated appropriately.
Steve Summit
scs(_at_)adam(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu