Re: Metaquestion on this group

[klensin@infoods.unu.edu (John C Klensin)]

> So, based on the fact that MIME charset is primarily for text/plain, with
> which we have collected some experience, shouldn't we have a specific
> objective of internationalized "encoding of plain text".

Unfortunately, we don't seem to have consensus in the community that
multilingual messages -- in MIME terms, single body parts containing
text in more than one language -- are "plain text".  If they are not,
then specification of an ISO character set together with a (separate?)
header that identifies the language is probably sufficient for all
"plain text" cases, and special in-body markup is needed for the other
cases.  

If they *are* "plain text", then one needs switching mechanisms, not
just "character sets" (in the "code table" sense).

Note that the MIME term "charset" does not appear in the above two
paragraphs. 

     john