JP> (Possibly one could criticize MIME for not supporting more
JP> than one character set within the same body part.
You may have noticed that the process of creating standards -- or, for that
matter, any engineering design process -- requires making compromises.
The possibility of allowing fine-grained changes in the type of the data was
considered for MIME.
And in fact, it's still possible. Nothing stops Jacob or anyone else from
defining a new type of body part that supports text of multiple character
encodings. The challenge is in making it technically sound and enough of a
win over HTML (which is already widely supported) that people want to
implement it and use it.
Good luck to anyone who wants to try!
Keith