Nathaniel;
I really don't think that MIME has to be more specific about the
interpretation of the right-to-left languages than the ISO character set
specifications.
The reason is same as why we shouldn't have full "ISO-2022" as a MIME
charset, that is, interoperability.
ISO character set specification is not intended to be interoperable
without a lot of prior negotiation. National variant characters of
ISO 646 and Han unification of ISO 10646 are such examples.
People using ISO-8859-[68] will most certainly exchange bi-directional
text. So, why not assure interoperability?
Just as the case with 7 bit 8859, I don't think I'm adding something
new. It's just a clarification of the defacto standard and the
agreement at Houston meeting.
Keith;
My take on this is that the next MIME RFC should simply say that
the effect of escape sequences (or any format effectors other
than a CR LF pair) are undefined for the charsets it defines.
For charsets that require bi-directionality, define them in
a separate document.
That's effectively equivalent to refering RFC1556 and should be OK.
Masataka Ohta