Re: Metaquestion on this group

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

> > If they *are* "plain text", then one needs switching mechanisms, not
> > just "character sets" (in the "code table" sense).
> 
> No, a large code table is equivalant to switched small tables.
> Unfortunately, 16 bit space is not sufficiently large.
> 
> We, anyway, need switching mechanism to use JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0212
> to encode some Japanese text with 7 bit encoding.
> 
> So, switching is not essential here. It's merely an encoding issue.

If you insist on not to switch, several people in Japan have proposed
several ways to encode ISO 2022 into 32bit word or multibyte without
switching.

I, and perhaps most of the experts in Japan, don't think it so good
because it is not directly displayable on commonly available hardware.
Moreover, it has no unified policy on encoding various languages so
that it does not worth supporting. But it is better than the combination
of MIME charset switching and B encoding.

Mr. Handa may be happy to explan encoding method he used internally
on memory with MULE.

						Masataka Ohta