Editing Double-byte character set (section)

==Ambiguity <span class="anchor" id="Controversy"></span> ==
Some people use DBCS to mean the [[UTF-16]] and [[UTF-8]] encodings, while other people use the term DBCS to mean older (pre-[[Unicode]]) character encodings that use more than one byte per character. [[Shift JIS]], [[GB 2312]] and [[Big5]] are a few character encodings that can contain more than one byte per character, but even using the term DBCS for these character encodings is incorrect terminology because these character encodings are really [[variable-width encoding]]s (as are both UTF-16 and UTF-8). Some [[IBM]] mainframes do have true DBCS code pages, which contain only the double byte portion of a multi-byte code page.

If a person uses the term "DBCS enablement" for software [[internationalization]], they are using ambiguous terminology. They either mean they want to write software for [[East Asian]] markets using older technology with code pages, or they are planning on using Unicode. Sometimes this term also implies [[translation]] into an East Asian language. Usually "Unicode enablement" means internationalizing software by using Unicode, and "DBCS enablement" means using incompatible character encodings that exist between the various countries in East Asia for internationalizing software. Since Unicode, unlike many other character encodings, supports all the major languages in East Asia, it is generally easier to enable and maintain software that uses Unicode. DBCS (non-Unicode) enablement is usually only desired when much older operating systems or applications do not support Unicode.