Excerpts from junk.info-mime: 17-Nov-94 Re: SWEDISH CHARACTERS IN E..
Masataka Ohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)c (1752)
Certainly. MIME charset mechanism is good to identify multiple
localizations. But, if one decides to use 8bit Latin-1 only, a
single localization, he does not need charset specification.
I think this is the heart of your misunderstanding, Ohta-san. You're
thinking about "localizations". In a sense, you're right that you don't
need MIME if you only have "a single localization", whatever that means.
The whole point of MIME's character set facilities, however, was not
"localization" but "globalization" -- making email intelligible
everywhere, regardless of geographic or linguistic issues.
I have had the privilege, in research labs in the US, of working with
people from Japan, India, various European countries, and other parts of
the world. Some of them have had to struggle mightily in order to
master the English they have to use in daily life. Why shouldn't they
be able to seamlessly slip back into their native tongue when they sit
down to send email to the folks back home? For that to work, from a US
machine, you don't need localization, you need globalization. And then
you need to be able to specify/identify the character set, which is the
main facility MIME provides in this regard. -- Nathaniel