>In our experience, each user community thinks it's a simple problem, since
>they only care about their pet character set; we've been having lengthy
>debates about SJIS with our Japanese distributor, for example :).
Who is your distributor?
>The problem with "just default to X," however, is that there as many
>X's as there are users.
Actually, this is quite true, because labelling is not universal here
yet, most users are required to set the encoding and coded character
set (or font, as it's often called... sigh) for the default, and
often, on a per-page basis. Recently browsers have offered support for
charset=xxxx, which is a good sign.
How do you feel about the *.mim(e) idea for CDROM storage etc?