Hello Keith, et al -- Taking Dave Crocker's advice, we need a proposal
for how to establish the appropriate Type/SubTypes and specify exactly
what they mean, including any necessary profiling.
We are told endlessly that Japan, Korea and China need profiling at
the MIME subtype level to distinguish among them, because of the HAN
Unification. Even I understand the unification and profiling problem
and am totally bored with the alternating monologues conducted here.
I am in deep sympathy with the fact that UNICODE does not do for
Japan, Korea, and China what it does for (pretty much) all others in
the world, but I cannot do anything about that, short of killing off
those who did this dirty deed. However, there is really no point in
doing this!
It is simpler to let the UNICODERS of the world go their way, and
declare in their RFC which specifies how to include UNICODE in MIME
that the Internet cannot reach consensus for how to label/profile CJK
text, so the specification does not apply to instances of CJK.
Then, if additional profiling is needed, is it seems to me that this
profiling should be specified for each of China, Korea and Japan, with
a different MIME subtype for each, so there will be at least 4.
iso-10646-not-cjk
iso-10646-china
iso-10646-korea
iso-10646-japan
With a separate RFC for each. Of course, of any of CJK do not wish to
define their profiles in Internet RFC's and register a subtype with
the IANA, then that is their problem, and not ours.
This will let us proceed, by separating the efforts which should
eliminate the arguments about the separate profiles, or at least
confine the arguments to within the separate profile groups.
My login here is that we cannot afford to let Japan veto the use of
ISO-10646(UNICODE) in MIME in the Internet by people who do not care
about the CJK problem.
For the record, I find this episode on ISO "progress" to be
particularly painful and sad, but I also know that it is pointless to
argue with them. Better to open the flood gates and let the market
deal with them in the long term.
As I see it working out, even the japanese Government will not be able
to force UNICODE to work in Japan by making decrees and mandating its
use. It is just the GOSIP game all over again. Some day they will
just have to give up if things are as flawed as the appear.
This is very unfortunate, but we still cannot allow anyone to have a
veto over allowing the use of ISO-10646(UNICODE) in MIME in the
Internet.
Remember, we elect to use "Rough Consensus and Runnng Code!"
It is not required that every specification do what every Internet
user wants it to do. It is only required that it is proven to work,
and is a consensus product of some group that wants to get some useful
work done, provided it does not harm other groups trying to get other
useful work done.
So, who is going to write the various specs? Surely not I!..\Stef