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!
Er, exactly. There have been many attempts to define something that's more than
plain text but less than a full blown markup system: X.400's Structured
Formatted Documents, simpletext, text/richtext, and text/enriched all come to
mind. I reviewed a media type registration for a new one a couple of days ago,
as a matter of fact. But so far none of these have been very successful.
The particular challenge of a format whose major feature is to allow for
multiple charsets would be to provide something that's superior to utf-8
text/plain. IMO that's a pretty serious challenge, both technically and
politically. While utf-8 isn't displacing legacy use of old charsets neearly to
the extent I'd like, the trend in new deployment is clearly to use utf-8 to
address the text internationalization problem. And any new text format is by
definition going to be a new deployment.
Ned