Many popular operating systems, database software, office automation (OA) suites, web browsers, e-mail clients and other application software already support the ISO/IEC 10646 international coding standard / Unicode. Furthermore, many information technology standards such as XML, Java, HTML and LDAP also support the ISO/IEC 10646 / Unicode for the processing of characters in various languages.
By adopting the ISO/IEC 10646 / 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/IEC 10646 / 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
https://www.unicode.org/resources/index.html.
We encourage developers of information technology products in Hong Kong to adopt the ISO/IEC 10646 / Unicode whenever practicable so as to efficiently expand the reach of their products to the global market in different languages.