From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > From my understanding, the only major market which mandate Surrogate > support is only China.
Important note here: China does not mandate support for GB18030 on all computer products that handle encoded text. Only in those new products that were developped since year 2000. This means that all products developed before 2000 can continue to be imported and sold into China. For example, Windows 95, 98, 88SE, and NT4 or Office 95, 97 (even 2000 because it was first developped and edited in 1999) or Java 1.3 can continue to be licenced there, including for new customers. But Microsoft would have been unable to sell or licence Windows 2000 or XP or 2003 in China if these had not included the support for characters not only in plane 2, but also ALL 17 planes of Unicode, as well as a complete mapping of these planes with GB18030, and of the required standard character properties of most recent version of Unicode at that date of manufacturing (excluding optional or informative properties). Requiring this support does not imply support for all glyphs. But China may decide sooner or later that these systems need the necessary rendering support for a minimum set of characters. I don't know exactly if there's such minimum subset defined for China. The minimum subsets in Europe are recommandations to best fit the EU market, but they are not mandatory (however minimum language requirements do exist in laws for products sold in some countries in the EU). On the opposite the MES-1, MES-2, MES-3 subsets in Europe does not mandate any encoding, but instead the support of glyphs for characters of these subsets, in products that claim to support them, but here also it is a recommandation, not a requirement (until there's a "Directive" voted, which must be implemented in each national legislation in the EU, after a limited time that typically must not exceed a couple of years).
