RE: General policy

[Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>]

> - We should do whatever we need to do to get things to work in the meantime.
> 
> I've got an idea that this requires our protocols to do character set
> *labelling*, and that character set *switching* may not be required,
> since there should be only approximately 4 things to label:
> 
> - US-ASCII
> - ISO 8859-1 (and other temporary, traditional means like 2022-jp)
> - Our 10-year hack
> - The "Final Solution".
> 
> There is a great deal of verbiage to be added in the design goals for
> the 10-year hack. Forgive me if I try to make it clearer.

Let me explain how is our experience on the Internet.

We, Japanese, have been using ISO-2022-JP character encoding for more
than 7 years and have enough experience on multiple language support,
so that we need no "10-year hack" any more.

It should also be noted that, ISO-2022-JP already have *switching*
mechanism between three character sets: ASCII, JIS X0201 roman and
JIS X 0208.

So, if you think you don't need the final solution now, it is OK.
But, part of the Internet does require it and is prepared for it.

						Masataka Ohta