"Chinese XML Now!" Project

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: David Brownell <db at Eng.Sun.COM>

> Is (Big5) superset of ASCII that supports traditional Chinese glyphs?

Yes. (However, there is a very large view that the difference is really a
character difference, not a glyph difference. Not a fruitful debate for us
here.)

>How does Big5 differ from other encodings that support similar glyphs?

Large: 13500 characters. Not national standard. Nasty encoding: octets
with value < 128 are used as second byte, so cannot be used with generic
8-bit software (eg for pattern matching) without some intervention.

>Who uses Big5?

ROC (Taiwan) and SAR (Hong Kong). I see SAR is starting to use a superset
of Big5 now, with some extra characters from PRC (China). I dont know what
they are, but I suspect they are simplified characters.


Rick Jelliffe



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