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Excerpts from internet.mmm-people: 8-Oct-92 MIME (RFC1341) Charset
ques.. Martin Wendel@bloom-beac (1301)

> I see a problem, though, when a message is originally created with
> characters that doesn't fit into one of the 8859 charsets but could 
> be squeezed into two or more. Is it the intent that such a message 
> should be of content type multipart/mixed? 

For now, yes.  Eventually, I expect that 10646/Unicode will be
registered as a MIME character set, and then you can send
mixed-character-set text within a single MIME object that way.

> Then, what about characters not in any one of the 8859's?

They just have to be registered.  Japanese users are well on their way
to having iso-2022-jp registered as the official MIME name for the
current Japanese usage.  Similar efforts are ongoing for Korean and
Vietnamese, and today I got my first inquiry about how to go about
registering a name for the existing Farsi character set usage in Iran.

> Finally, why not use mnemonics? That would eliminate the need for
> the quoted-printable content-transfer-encoding.

There was a great deal of discussion about this on the MIME list. 
Eventually, what it came down to was a belief that MIME should
essentially be descriptive rather than prescriptive -- that is, MIME
should provide a way of defining & registering character set names to
correspond to existing usage, and to new usage as it is adopted (e.g.
unicode/10646), but not that MIME should push a new agenda for the world
of character sets.  The Mnemonic encoding is very appealing, but until
it is widely adopted it is not suitable as the primary MIME character
set mechanism.

> BTW what charsets aside from US-ASCII and ISO8859-[1-9] have been
> accepted as standard MIME charsets?

Those are the only ones in the base MIME document.  A spec for
iso-2022-jp has been published as an Internet Draft, but I don't know if
it has turned into an RFC and/or received any official standard status
yet.  I think that other efforts are even less far along in the process.

Hope that helps.  -- Nathaniel