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.
IETF is successful because it believes that current (including current
*non-Japaneese*) use and interoperability are good reasons.
SUUUUURRRRREEEEE!!!!.
THE CURRENT use of RFC 822 is to use it as NET-ASCII, that is,
anything 7bit (actally 1-126).
So, the current draft of MIME to try to narrow it, non-MIME RFC 8822
to US-ASCII (which is not well defined and which of the control
characters are included is unspecified, but something narrower than
NET-ASCII of RFC 822) is exactly what we should NOT do.
If you believe that ISO standards should control everything, why are
you spending your time in IETF WGs? Why aren't you out there
implementing or trying to improve X.400 and leaving us in peace?
Do you know the current (including current *non-Japaneese*) use and
interoperability of e-mail?
They are all based on ISO 2022. They (including US-ASCII, ISO-8859-*,
KOI-8, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-KR, some vietnnamese encoding, all
the national variants of ISO 646 in France, Sweden, ...) all use
ISO 2022 invocation and/or designation mechanisms.
They (except for US-ASCII and 8bit encoding) DO use NET-ASCII, not
US-ASCII.
But, I know this specification of MIME is just vapor.
You seem to know a lot of things which others disagree with, don't you?
AVERAGE Japanese computer USERS certainly know a lot more than
abstract-specification writers in U.S. on encoding issues.
I, as an implementor and researcher, may know a little more than
average Japanese users.
So?
With 10 years of experience, we know that, as ISO-2022-JP is used
universally in Japan, there are no points to label it.
Even if it were true that ISO-2022-JP were the only character set in
use everywhere in Japan, which I don't believe for a minute,
That's simply wrong. Three major encoding methods (7bit JIS, EUC and shift
JIS) are used in Japan. But, as we learned the incnvenience, we
decided to use only the ISO-2022-JP (7bit JIS) on the Internet 10
years ago.
That's the concluusion we reached through the experience of having
multiple encoding.
And through 10 years of various experience, the decsion has been
observed quite well.
Japan in not the whole world.
ISO 2022 based encoding is the only encoding actually used on the
Internet as a whole.
You should say:
US is not the whole world
It's OK for MIME to have charset. But don't think it so useful.
Masataka Ohta