I can appreciate your confusion!
1. This list was created in order to create documents that made
a standard for carrying things that were not only US ASCII text
in Intenret Mail. The result was MIME.
2. Now that MIME is (nearly) a full Standard, this list exists so that
one can discuss the interpretation of that standard and issues
arising out of the experience we gather about that standard.
3. Certain functions in MIME, namely the charset= parameter for text/plain
and the header encoding mechanism, can be used for localization, and
may be used for internationalization once activities outside this list
have decided what the internationalization effort of the IETF
community is aiming towards. The properties of these functions and
the proper use of them is an appropriate topic for this list, IMHO.
4. Given that there is no censorship or exclusive membership of this list,
it is impossible to control what is discussed on the list, and so,
the list may become an arena for discussions that have nothing to do
with I think is the purpose of the list.
(Yes, I know you asked only 3 questions :-)
It is my personal opinion that the realities of the marketplace in the
network are going to force the use of MIME; there does not exist any
mechanism in the Internet that can force anyone to adopt or not adopt
MIME as his or her personal tool, so I may easily be wrong.
Harald T. Alvestrand