CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

CCS Standards

|

85

e rst multiple-byte national coded character set standard among the CJKV locales

was established by the Japanese Standards Association (JSA) on January 1, 1978 and was

designated JIS C 6226-1978. Without a doubt, the birth of this character set standard sent

waves throughout the CJKV locales.

Other CJKV locales, such as Korea and China, inspired by the success of JIS C 6226-1978,

followed soon aer by imitating the Japanese standard, and in some cases copied more

than merely the encoding method or arrangement of characters. It has been claimed, for

example, that Taiwan’s Big Five character set borrowed many kanji forms from Japan’s JIS

C 6226-1978 character set.

At the beginning of each subsection, which generally corresponds to each region, I indi-

cate what character sets are the most important. Some character sets come and go, some

are useful for historical purposes, but one or two are generally considered more impor-

tant, either because they are the most commonly used character sets or are mandated by

that region’s government.

In addition, because of the extreme importance of Unicode today, almost all of the fol-

lowing sections will include a subsection about Unicode compatibility with one or more

important standards that are covered. ese subsections will indicate what version of Uni-

code provides full support for their character sets, and also will