Re: Why do MIME imlementations sometimes fail

On Saturday, September 27, 2003, at 11:45  AM, ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:

> 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. 

Precisely.  But Jacob is also right on target when he writes:

> One interesting thing I have noted is that localized
> software often works well when a user only uses his
> national language, but not when a local user wants to use
> another language than his own. 

Even more deeply than a bias towards English, American programmers are biased towards unilingualism, and this bias is simply translated into any other single language.  I have yet to see a mail tool (or actually any computing environment) that does a really good job of supporting people trying to communicate regularly in multiple languages.  

I seriously doubt that this is a standards issue, though -- I think it's a combination of a cultural issue (Americans are mostly monolingual) and a simple technical issue: it's really *hard* to build a good monolingual user interface, and anyone who wants to do so is unlikely to find MIME encoding to be one of his greatest challenges.  In many cases, I think what's failing is not so much the standards as the user interface.  -- Nathaniel