Dana (and others),
One clarification: 10646 is inherently a 32 bit character set (referred
to in the Standard as UCS-4). 10646.1, the "basic multilingual plane" (BMP)
is 16 bits (UCS-2) and more or less isomorphic with Unicode (same code
points, probably some differences in philosophy and conformance rules).
To my knowledge, the only proposals we have on the table are
proposals about 10646, "extraterrestrial linguistics" and all--there are
apparently already enough proposals for additions on the table to push
characters off of the BMP, so our only realistic alternatives are to
find a way to support UCS-4 or to plan to support _both_ UCS-2 and UCS-4.
--john