Controversy
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) code pages that use more than one byte per character. Shift-JIS, GB2312 and Big5 are a few code pages that can contain more than one byte per character, but even using the term DBCS for these code pages is incorrect terminology because these code pages are really MBCS (MultiByte Character Sets). Some IBM mainframes do have true DBCS code pages, which contain only the double byte portion of a multibyte 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 code pages that exist between the various countries in East Asia for internationalizing software. Since Unicode supports all the major languages in East Asia, unlike many other code pages, 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.
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