Re: 10646, and all that

I hope people have not misconstrued the intended meaning of:

Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO646- [Han_Language] -
[Devanagari_Language]

, where xxx_Language refers to the writen form (not any spoken dialect).

This was a proposal for minimal disambiguation of those language groups which
employ character sets folded in the current 10646 spec--currently thought
limited to the Devanagari family of 9? languages, and the Han family of 4
languages.  ie:

      Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO646-Taiwanese-Kannada

The above would establish to a receiving UA that the intention of the sender was
that the message should be displayed with han rendered as traditional Hanzi, and
the Devanagari rendered in a font suitable for Kannada.

Extension to more languages opens us up to a pandoras box.

Also, rather than rely on language names, perhaps published national standards
could be referenced, I know that these exist for Han, but I am not sure if
unique designations exist for the devanagari variants, but if they did then one
might have:

   Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO646-GB2312.1980- [????]

Obviously this would best be used for a message which excluded any other Han and
any other Devanagari content, and it implies that both would be present, else
neither specification would be necessary.

This brings up the Q of positionality, 

if the following were not equally acceptable:

    Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO646-Bengali-Japanese
    Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO646-Japanese-Bengali

then something like:
 
    Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO646--Bengali

would be necessary for Bengali sans Han content (note that it could still
contain japanese Kana or Korean Hangul, which are not ambiguous).

--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>