But you may find that it takes more time to get widespread acceptance
of mnemonic, than it does to deploy real MIME mail readers!
Yeah, it takes time. And hard work. About users embracing things,
that is not so easy. They do what is possible to them, and it is in fact
not the users who decide, but the system administrator, and then in
some cases - it is the recommendations and services of the network
provider.
It is all of these. Sometimes the users have control, sometimes the syadmins,
sometimes the higher-ups. (And even when the higher-ups claim to be the boss
on such things, users often do what they want to in spite of the official
policy...)
And they do what is possible, that is - what can be easily
installed, and what interacts with other systems in the best way.
So that depend on implementors, and they implement what is required
(mandatory) and what is nice and easy, at least in the first round.
Then they wait for customer response. mnemonics did not make the
'required' list in the first round, and was thus not widely implemented,
althoug some significant implementations exist.
Really? What user agents implement it?
Some agreement and general recommendations from IETF would certainly
help.
Well, to do this, you'd have to get *consensus* in the IETF that mnemonic
should be on the standards track. And given the nature of the character set
debates these days, I'd say that consensus would be pretty hard to get!
MIME contains things that people could agree on. The reason that there's no
universal character set in MIME, is that the MIME people couldn't agree on one
during the time that MIME was being developed.
I don't think we're any closer to agreement today than we were then.
Keith