Ray Van Eng (04/30/96)
Four Asian countries: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have agreed
on a standard that will translate electronic messages typed in one country's
machine into a native format to be displayed correctly on another machine
in another country.
Although the Chinese language is being used in the four countries, some variations in computer coding, words and syntax have made it difficult for the four countries to understand each other's written messages. With the standard for the computer representation of the Chinese language being approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group, the popularity of the Internet will certainly grow as a result among these countries.
It is estimated that between 32% to 35% of the world's population uses Chinese characters as a basis for their native language and every major countries in the world have an oversea Chinese population. The Netscape 2.0 and the Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 browsers have Chinese language support built-in.