From: Harald Alvestrand <Harald(_at_)Alvestrand(_dot_)no>
The same thinking that says that MIME Version headers make sense in
general IETF list mail also says that localized alphabets and glyphs must
be used in absolutely all contexts, including those that everyone must
use and so would expect to be limited to the lowest common denominator.
it may have escaped the notice of some that a fair bit of the discussion on
diacritcs was carried out using live examples, and while I am sure there
were some who did not see the diacritics on screen, at least there was a
single definition of how to get from what was sent on the wire to what
might have been displayed on the screen, and MANY of the participants
actually saw them correctly displayed.
Diacritical marks are no different from Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew,
Sanskrit, and other non-Latin character sets in not being not part of
the international language. The goal of communicating is to communicate,
not wave flags in support of national languages. When you are trying
to talk to strangers and have no clue about their languages, you are a
fool to not use the common, international language, no matter how poor
and ugly it is.
MIME character sets is an example of a battle fought and won.
When MIME is used to pass special forms among people whose common
understandings including more or other than ASCII, MIME is a battle
fought and won.
When MIME is used to send unintelligible garbage, it is a battle fought
and lost. Whether the garbage is HTML, the latest word processing
format from Redmond or a good representation of the mother tongue of
1,000,000,000 people is irrelevant to whether the use of MIME is wise
or foolish. If the encoding is not known before hand to be intelligible
to its recipients, then the use of MIME is foolish.
MIME is a good *localization* mechanism, either in geography or culture
or in computer applications (e.g. pictures or sound).
The continuing IETF efforts to extend MIME to include yet more extra or
special forms in the vague hope that the recipient will surely be able to
interpret at least one is probably the best of what we can expect from
"internationalized" domain names in 2 or 3 years. Unless something like
Vint Cerf's principle of encoding *localized* domain names in ASCII is
followed, the IDN efforts will at best repeat the history of MIME email
exemplified by the many Microsoft MIME formats.
In MIME, except in special cases, the "universal" form of the body is
either sufficient and the fancy versions useless wastes of cycles, storage,
and bandwidth, or the "universal" form can only say "sorry, better upgrade
your system." Just as in the vast majority of HTML+ASCII email where
there is can be no useful difference and there is rarely a visible
difference between the ASCII plaintext and the HTML encrypted version,
*localized* domain names will either be unusable outside their native
provinces or they will be usable with a 7-bit ASCII keyboard.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com