We could probably argue forever over shades of meaning of "glyph"
and "character" (and I gather that the ISO working groups on
character sets do so),
The ISO result should have nothing to do with how IETF thinks a character
code should be.
but I would hope that for the purposes of
IETF we could duck a few of those issues and accept the fruits of
the Unicode and ISO10646 "unification" efforts.
We should be careful not to eat rotten fruits.
(Stuffs trying to defend Unicode and authorize unification is deleted)
Your reasoning is meaningful (though still somewhat incorrect) only when
the basic objective:
The Unicode standard defines only how characters are interpreted,
not how glyphs are rendered.
is meaningful.
If any interchange standard desires to transmit
language information, it should not rely on the character set,
but should instead use an explicit field in a header of some
kind.
It should also be noted that, without language information, Unicode
can't give the correct rendering of Devanagari script, either.
Rendering of Devanagari is different language by language.
If the concern is merely that the display fonts being used by
Chinese and Japanese speakers tend to differ more significantly
than those used for, say, English and German, this seems like a
comparatively minor issue.
Can you explain why Microsoft is providing "JAPANESE" font set with
Unicode?
To be pragmatic, it is THE MARKET DEMAND to distinguish Chinese Han
and Japanese Han.
Masataka Ohta