And now is the time to consider the Internaionalized Internet including
mails, to which MIME is unrelated.
Just to jump to the defence of Ohta-san here: I've had fairly lengthy
discussions with him in private e-mail, and it seems that he is positing a
complete overhaul of text on the Internet, whether it be in mail messages,
the DNS, whois servers, or whatever, to put it into an international
context.
And note also that ISO-2022-INT won't be harmful for the future
internationalization of the Internet with 8bit encoding.
Most of those services do not have the ability to mark charset
as MIME does.
Are there anyone who want to change all the protocols, if the terminal
emulaters (which may be colocated with MUAs) only need to be changed?
Now, in the context of MIME, (I think) he believes that once this
internationalization goal is acheived, the need to mark charset is
ludicrous, and maybe we should be heading towards a world where the
default is ISO-2022-INT-1 and not US-ASCII. He himself doesn't use MIME
because he doesn't see the need for it.
Of couse.
For myself, I think getting rid of the labels we have carefully crafted
into MIME and/or changing the charset default is a bad idea.
It is might be a bad idea until the internationalization goal is acheived.
I don't want to debate on that point.
The Internet
won't change overnight to use ISO-2022-INT-1, UNICODE, or any other
charset that may be posited in the future for internationalization.
Sure.
Can we stop now please? It's getting a little tiring. I appauld the
Swedish efforts to standardise on ISO 8859/1. It may not be optimal for
internationalization in the long run, but in the short term it is going to
solve a lot of nagging problems in that particular community.
So, Swedish may or may not use MIME.
Masataka Ohta