In early days of computer and communication world, the Western world, esp. the US, dominated. As a result, the coding of character sets was defined to suit the Western needs. 7- or 8-bit character coding was adopted. As Asian world began to catch up, we soon realized that this encoding scheme, based on ISO 2022, only serves regions with phonetic character sets, esp. ASCII characters. The unique status of ASCII in ISO 2022 makes English character so privileged that ideographic character sets are almost extinct in international communication. Currently, based on ISO 2022, each member city of AOW has its own national standard. Tokyo has JIS; Seoul has KS; Beijing has GB; and Taipei has CNS code. A lot of Chinese characters are commonly used in our region. However, codes for them can at best be used domestically, they are hard to get across national borders. With the advanet of ISO 10646, at last there is a way to bridge these character sets. So that conceptually, we can all use our own national standards domestically, but when crossing borders, we translate our codes to ISO 10646 codes. The other party translates ISO 10646 code back to his/her national standard codes, thus successfully convey the originator's characters into the recipient's characters. This paper surveys some of ISO protocols and proposes modifications for them to use ISO 10646.
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