It appears that although 10646 is imperfect (some would say sorely lacking),
it's the best technical solution yet devised.
Do you have any techncal reason to think 10646 is the best technical
solution? I think there is no.
I apologize for being imprecsise. When I said "best technical
solution yet devised", I meant "for a single worldwide character set".
My reasons for believing that 10646 is the best technical solution
yet devised are: (a) 10646 does appear to have been developed by
a great number of experts from all over the world, and (b) I haven't
seen an alternative that has a similar amount of expertise behind
it. Have you?
Finally, registration of 10646 as a MIME charset is NOT an endorsement of
10646,
So, why you can't register it with profiling?
MIME requires that the character be completely specified by the character set
name. This is so mail mail readers don't have to make complicated decisions
about whether they support a particular character set; they can just
compare character set strings. Given that mail readers have to support
many different kinds of content-types, it still seems like this was
a good engineering decision to minimize the complexity in the mail reader.
For 10646 with profiling to fit within the MIME structure, it would
have to be a different content-type. Something like text/iso-10646.
It could then have whatever parameters it wanted to contain the
profiling information.
Keith Moore