Re: SWEDISH CHARACTERS IN EMAIL: THE SUNET INITIATIVE

I must say I'm getting really tired of the way you're twisting this
around.

> >  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.
> 
> And do so in a single message, which is unrelated to MIME.
> 
> Thus, MIME is unrelated to globalization/internationalization.

This depends on whether you believe that communication will be globalized
more quickly and universally via top-down or bottom-up methods.  If there
were someone in a position to dictate a single universal character set that
the whole world would use, your approach would be workable.  I don't think
this is possible in the short term, and possibly not in the next 50 years.
That leaves the bottom-up method, where linguistic communities are free to
choose their OWN preferred way to represent text, but adopt a global
labelling convention to tell which representation they are using.  That's
the MIME approach, and I think it is the only short-term feasible approach
to globalized text.

> In which langauge, you can commnicate with others?
> 
> I shall not accept the answer "English".

I don't have a clue what you mean by "shall not accept the answer English"
-- are you saying that English speakers don't count, that their experience
is irrelevant?

I don't see why it matters, but for the record I have been known to
communicate to greater or lesser degree in English, Hebrew, Spanish,
Italian, and German, although I'm very rusty at all of them besides
English.

> > And then
> > you need to be able to specify/identify the character set, which is
the
> > main facility MIME provides in this regard.  -- Nathaniel
> 
> Not at all. You are thinking only about text with a
> single localized charset, which is totally unrelated to
> globaliization/internationalization, where single text may
> contain all the charactters in the world.
> 
> That's a simple misunderstanding TOO commonly found within native
> Latin alpabet users.

Please stop telling me what I am thinking about.  You are simply wrong in
that regard.  I fully realize that some messages will contain multiple
languages.  So what?  As it happens, MIME's multipart mechanism gives us a
way to do this now, for those rare messages that need it, without having to
give up our existing conventions for representing our OWN languages.

This MIME message, for example, includes my name in Hebrew:
םולש ןב ילתפנ

and the name of a Japanese MIME-implementing colleague in Japanese:
佐藤豊


Now, would it be nicer and more elegant if this entire message were in a
single character set?  Of course!  And when such a universal character set
comes into widespread use, that will be great.  Until then, however, MIME
gives me a way to send this message, including text in English, Japanese,
and Hebrew, with a high level of confidence that it will be readable on a
wide range of platforms and with a wide range of implementations.  --
Nathaniel