Re: 10646, and all that

> > As others have already pointed out (and as RFC1341 itself points out), a
> > lot of separate character set registrations is not a good idea.
> Isn't the following mail of this ML the reason of that?
>
>       This is the reason that I would have liked MIME to only reference
>       ASCII and ISO 8859-1 as the basic requirements, with the intention to
>       use ISO 10646 when it becomes IS. Instead of allowing a lot of
Whatever might have been the case in April, I think it is very clear
today that the strategy of making a transition to the almost exclusive
use of 10646 as the one network transport character set for text is not
realistic.  The problems you have pointed out have contributed to that
conclusion.  But the source of "the fewer character set registrations
the better" principle in MIME is really separate from any prospects for
10646 and has to do with implementation complexity.  Support for many
intra-10646 forms causes most of the same implementation complexity, I
think.

> Then, one possible solution is to have something like 10646.2-x. That is:
   This is just a personal opinion, but my feeling is that, if we have
to support 10646.2 separately from 10646.1 (and can't mix characters
from the two parts together), we thereby abandon all notions of a
"universal character set" (Dan's hope underlying the message from which
you quoted) and end up with something that has all of the weaknesses of
the ISO 8859 family but that consumes two or four times as many bits.  
If that is the only alternative, then I think we need to reexamine
approaches based on ISO 2022 as providing both better identification and
more compactness.

Ohta-san, I think it is time we drop this discussion for a while.  I
think that the same positions are being recycled, that nothing you are
saying is persuading me to like 10646-x-y approaches any more and that
nothing I (and a few others) are saying is persuading you to like it any
less (or even to understand our position any better).  And presumably
the people on this list who don't care very much about character issues
are getting considerably annoyed with all of us.  I, at least, am
dropping out of this until I either have a concrete proposal or discover
something really new to say on the subject.
     john