ISO has been trying to find a way to help
people understand what these words mean within the context of ISO
standards. The character/glyph model was developed as a part of this
effort.
So, they can say even serious problems, which did not exist with ASCII
or 8859-1, of text encoding is not their business because their
definition of "character/glyph" is so.
As Glenn says, 10646 is complete, published, and being implemented.
It is complete "character set" standard, as long as its own definition
of a "character" concerns. Thus, it sais nothing on how the glyph of
two "characters": a base "character" and a combining "character", will be.
It is
not being redesigned, and the character/glyph model has no impact on 10646
implementations -- except, we hope, to help people understand the final
standard better.
Perhaps such implementations can not handle level 2 or level 3 10646.
Maybe the implementaions have nothing to do with displaying of text.
If not, could you write an ISO standard for us on how glyphs of combined
results, which are actively undefined in ISO 10646, will be?
ISO 10646 is done. OK. It is a complete standard of "characters" with
its own definition of a "character". But it is incomplete as an text
encoding standard.
Masataka Ohta