THIS IS A MESSAGE IN 'MIME' FORMAT. Your mail reader does not support MIME.
Please read the first section, which is plain text, and ignore the rest.
You should have written above without "> " quotations.
--Interpart.Boundary.UimpZgv0Eyt5E6eXAX
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
No, my mail reader does not support MIME.
I must say I'm getting really tired of the way you're twisting this around.
What is the twist?
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.
Whatever you might believe, communication is already globalized.
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.
ISO-2022-INT-* is the one.
I don't think this is possible in the short term,
and possibly not in the next 50 years.
No, we need additions of repertoire forever.
That leaves the bottom-up
method, where linguistic communities are free to choose their OWN
preferred way to represent text,
Most of the Internet is uninterested in linguistic communities. One
of the reason of the failure of ISO10646/UNICODE is to hear from
them to allow arbitrary combination of combining characters. So,
let them what they want in their own way and let them alone.
but adopt a global labelling convention
to tell which representation they are using. That's the MIME approach,
That's LOCALE approach proved to be unusable long before by general
public unusable (though expers predicted the result from the
beginning).
So, don't repeated the failure again.
and I think it is the only short-term feasible approach to globalized
text.
It's nott globalized at all.
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?
Your communication experience through English only is, virtally, NIL,
because you can do it with US-ASCII only.
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.
Hebrew could have been a real experience for bidiirectinality issues
(though it is constant spaced).
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?
Yes, you fully realize that some messages will contain multiple Latin
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,
Only within MIME, yes. But, how can you use "grep"?
without having to give up our existing conventions for representing our
OWN languages.
ISO-2022-INT-1 is designed not to have to give up your existing
8bit conventions for representing your OWN languages.
This MIME message, for example, includes my name in Hebrew:
[An Andrew ToolKit view (mailobjv) was included here, but could not be
displayed.] and the name of a Japanese MIME-implementing colleague in
Japanese:
[An Andrew ToolKit view (mailobjv) was included here, but could not be
displayed.]
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.
I'm afraid some (but not so many) of you are seeing strange glyphs
in distinct windows uurelated to the original flow of the information.
Anyway,
Your question and answer should be:
Now, would it be nicer and more elegant if this entire message
is in a single charset? Of course! And when such a universal
charset comes into widespread use, that will be great.
Until then, however,
Now is "then".
Masataka Ohta