} The reality is that it is readable by all the people who can read it.
Ohta-san,
Although I am able to read only a few characters of Kanji and a bit more
of Katakana, I would love to be able to be able to display any Japanese
email that I might receive; for the simple beauty of the characters, for
my practice in learning to read it, and so my wife can perhaps translate
it for me.
I don't mind if you support ISO-2022-INT-* as one of MIME charsets.or not.
Unfortunately, I have no "terminal emulator". I have instead an X11-based
graphical mail user agent, which must display the messages I receive and
generate the messages I send.
While such a use is rare, you are merely collocating a mailer and
a terminal emulator.
Further, it is of equal importance to me
to be able to receive, manipulate and send pictures and other graphical
data as it is to deal with text; so I do not reasonably have the choice of
resorting to a mail program that works within a terminal emulator.
I don't mind your collocated terminal emulator may also be able to
handle autido/vidual data.
I can, if I know for any given message that it is necessary, pass the
message on to another "emulator" of some kind; that leaves me unable to
manipulate the message as I do other messages, for example to excerpt from
it as I have done with your messages above, but at least I can look at it.
Passing the mail message or any other text on the Internet to UNIX pipe,
to another Internet commands etc. are the thing we are doing everyday.
I don't mind if some of you don't need it, as long as you don't
say we should suffer a lot of inconvenience.
However, it would be wasteful for me to pass every message I receive to
such an emulator, as the vast majority of my correspondents do not send
me ISO 2022 text; and some of them may even send me messages that would
be interpreted incorrectly if I attempt to treat them as ISO 2022.
I have said several times that I don't mind you use MIME.
Why
must I continue only to guess, when it would be so simple to be told?
You don't have to. You can just assume ISO-2022-INT-*, not US-ASCII.
You say, "The reality is that it is readable by all the people who can
read it." Each time I see a message from you, I wonder with sorrow why
you seek to exclude so many from that group.
From which group? Are you saying I should teach Japanese to all
the people in the world?
My sorrow, though, is for
others who will suffer by such exclusion; you have already built a wall
around yourself which no greater reality could hope to breach.
I'm just destroying the wall around US-centric people.
Bart Schaefer Vice President, Technology, Z-Code Software
schaefer(_at_)z-code(_dot_)com Division of Network Computing
Devices, Inc.
civilization (siv"i-le-za'shen), n., see ISO 2022
I'm afraid you don't understand the difference between cultivaiton and
civilization.
Masataka Ohta