Future trends
In this business, 2 years is a long-term prediction.
So, in this timeframe, I predict:
- The conversion of almost all Internet mail activites to usage
of MIME
- The introduction of reasonable gateways between MIME and most
kinds of other mail systems including PC LAN systems
- The proliferation of bugs that have to do with conversions
between character sets
- The widespread use of one or more large character sets like
ISO-2022-INT or ISO 10646
I also predict that the following will not happen:
- The death of X.400
- The death of US ASCII
- The death of ISO 8859-1 and variants
- Any lessening of frustration with character sets
With these predictions, I predict a safe future for the employment of
character set experts.
Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
Last modified: Wed Nov 30 00:55:35 1994