Vernon;
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.
FYI, we, Japanese, have, long before MIME, been and still are
exchanging local characters purely within the framework of RFCs
821 and 822. See RFC 1468.
MIME is a good *localization* mechanism, either in geography or culture
No.
ISO 2022 gives the good localization mechanism.
Unlike MIME, you can use and we are using it in UNIX files without
mail headers, file types, charset tagging nor POSIX locales.
ISO 2022 gives proper localization information. It can be used in
internationalized computer files to store international
characters and on internationalized computer terminals to
display international characters.
However, even with ISO 2022, it is meaningless to "internationalize"
domain names, of course, because ISO 2022 do not "internationalize"
people using domain names.
The only problem of ISO 2022 is that it is too complex having too
much optional features beyond the localization. So, proper profiling,
such as that specified in RFC 1468, is essential.
Then, ISO 10646 *simplified* ISO 2022 by removing the essential
feature of localization keeping all the other complexities,
many of which are now, though ignored, mandated.
MIME charset may be useful for ISO 10646.
MIME charset can supply the localization information to ISO 10646
as I demonstrated, as a silly joke, in RFC 1815.
Masataka Ohta
PS
Note that MIME charsets of "ISO-8859-*" also removes the essential
but optional feature of ISO 2022 to give localization information
inline, which makes MIME useful for "ISO-8859-*".