It was not feasability that was under discussion. It was whether or not it
is safe to dispense with character set labels, be they iso-8859-1 or
iso-2022-jp or whatever. Nathaniel's point was that, until everyone is
using the same character set (be it unicode or iso-2022 or some other
universal character set), it will be necessary to label the character set
that is being used.
As the only ISO standard on which internationalized text encoding is
built upon is ISO 2022, there is no reason to use other character sets.
By sending out ISO-2022 and having it come up gibberish on our screens,
you've proved that ISO-2022 is not universally used, which was most of
Nathaniel's point.
Completely pointless. You, apparently, don't know how to handle missing
fonts. We do know through our experience. There was an era when we
couldn't support all the JIS Han characters.
If you can't understand the content of the properly displayed message,
it's OK if gibberish comes up.
Moreover, ISO-2022-INT-* specification is designed to assure font exists
so that there are no reason that you can't have font.
And, finally, it is always possible to handle undisplayable 2022 escape
sequences as undisplayable MIME standard charsets. That is, to
show users the escape sequence as is, which is no worse compared to
MIME. But, I know this specification of MIME is just vapor.
I'm not saying that 2022 isn't feasible (nor am I now saying that it is).
What I am saying is that, until some character set is used universally, it
will be necessary for utilities to have a way of discovering which
character set is being used in a particular message. That character set
may even be ISO-2022-JP; fine, no problem. So long as it's labelled.
With 10 years of experience, we know that, as ISO-2022-JP is used
universally in Japan, there are no points to label it.
The next step WAS to design globaly universal encoding.
If you don't have any experiences, I don't count you.
Please, let's not start the name-calling again.
What experience do you have on the issue, then?
Masataka Ohta