Globalization of Products

Many popular operating systems, database software, office automation (OA) suites, web browsers, e-mail clients and other application software already support the ISO 10646 standard / Unicode. Furthermore, many information technology standards such as XML, Java, HTML and LDAP also support the ISO 10646 standard / Unicode for the processing of characters in various languages.

By adopting the ISO 10646 standard / Unicode in the core parts of their information technology products, developers can produce different versions of the products based on the same core parts but with user interfaces in different languages. Comparing with the past practices of developing, maintaining and supporting the different versions of the same products based on different internal coding standards for different languages, the adoption of the ISO 10646 standard / Unicode saves developers a great deal of development costs and shortens the time to introduce new products to the market.

Information on Unicode-enabled products can be found on
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/onlinedat/products.html.

We encourage developers of information technology products in Hong Kong to adopt the ISO 10646 standard / Unicode whenever practicable so as to efficiently expand the reach of their products to the global market in different languages.

To supplement Government's efforts in establishing and promoting the common Chinese language interface, the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) develops a "ISO 10646 Information Center" web site as a focal channel to disseminate information of IT products that support the ISO 10646 standard and the HKSCS. IT product vendors are encouraged to submit information about their products that support the ISO 10646 standard and the HKSCS to HKPC for posting on the "ISO 10646 Information Center" web site. Such web site will provide the public with a comprehensive range of product information that support the ISO 10646 standard and the HKSCS, thus promoting the wider adoption of such products in the community and further enhancing our local IT infrastructural environment for the public to communicate electronically using Chinese in a more effective manner.