Am I missing the point?
slightly, the advent of speach-interactive hardware is obliging
some of us to deal with the concept of new ways to "read"
text.
The blind are a significant population, many more of them
would be enabled to use computers given suitable "readers",
and vocal rendition of arbitrary text is beginning to rear
its ugly head in the real world.
With text, the purpose (as I understand it) of the
various headers is to convey to the user agent the
information necessary to choose the correct character
set and language conventions for displaying the
message.
Yes, unfortunatly "display" is not necessarily limited to
the visual forms we have come to love/hate.
Language variants that have no impact on the textual
display, I believe, therefore do not need to be
represented in the MIME headers for text delivery.
unfortunatly, this all hinges on the meaning of "display".
For voice messages carried by MIME, I believe that
language specification has no effect on the message
delivery and is therefore relevant only to the
recipient(s) of a message, in giving them a clue
of what to expect.
Assuming that the format of the voice message incorporates
the dialect (ie, digitized sound) this would be true,
provided no alternative text or sign rendering technology
is conceivable.
--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)Umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>