I myself use as old fashioned MUAs as possible -- yes, really!
and for my most common needs that is all perfectly ok. I never
see any QP-coded texts, because my MTA converts QP away when
storing to my mailbox.
(When UCB-Mail, and ELM+metamail aren't enough, I use other
tools, but that is a rare case..)
It should be noted that almost all the news and mail readers (including
elm) is already converted to handle ISO-2022-JP long ago. A lot of
Japanese contributed to the effort for there favourite tools. Now, we
formed a mailing list to make the tools handle ISO-2022-INT-*.
Now I don't see any reason why those who prefer ISO-2022-INT-*
in their mailboxes would not arrange all incoming messages
translated into that format ?
And there is no reason why those who prefer ISO-2022-INT-* can not arrange
all outgoing messages in ISO-2022-INT-*. Those who also like MIME may even
attach "charset=INT-2022-INT-[123...]".
Is the only thing preventing such from happening just our
lazines to write the necessary translators into MTAs, and
get them installed ?
It is a waste of effort to make all the recipients MUA recognize
various conventions of locally used charsets such as ISO-8859-1.
Some UA may recongnize ISO-8859-1 only. Some may recognize KOI8-R only.
And the result is lack of interoperability.
With ISO-2022-INT-*, we can localize the issue in terminal emulators.
And back to NNTP/News..
However keep in mind that THE NORMAL CASE is to use SINGLE
LANGUAGE in the whole article,
Wrong. That's a special case for English messages only. BTW, Your
terminology "SINGLE LANGUAGE" is confusing. It should be "SINGLE
SCRIPT". That is, THE NORMAL CASE for non English naives is mixed
ASCII Non-ASCII scripts, at least. Finnish may think it single
Latin script, but for the most of the people in the world, the
situation is different.
and format it as if it is
MIME text/plain -message.
Sure. basic encoding system don't have to support more than plain text.
Anything more esoteric (multiple languages, multiple bodies, ..)
needs MIME, and possibly MNEM, or ISO-2022-INT-*.
Wrong. All the people in the world is using text they daily use as
"text/plain". For Japanese language processing, ISO-2022-JP is being
used as plain text ffor about 10 years. ISO-2022-INT-* is for the very
basic plain text for all the people in the world.
You can't forbid people using non-Latin scripts use native scripts as
plain text.
Ideal would be to get the installed base of user clients
upgraded to MIME,
No. MIME nor 8bitness is of no help for real multilingual issues.
Masataka Ohta