JIS X 0208 - History - Future

Future

JIS X 0213 (extended kanji) was designed “with the goal being to offer a sufficient character set for the purposes of encoding the modern Japanese language that JIS X 0208 intended to be from the start”; it defines a character set that expands upon the kanji set of JIS X 0208. The drafters of JIS X 0213 recommend migration from JIS X 0208 to JIS X 0213, among the advantages being JIS X 0213’s compatibility with the Hyōgai Kanji Glyph List and with newer jinmeiyō kanji.

Contrary to the expectations of the drafters, adoption of JIS X 0213 has been anything but fast since its enactment in the year 2000. The drafting committee of JIS X 0213:2004 wrote (in the year 2004), “The status where ‘what the majority of information systems can use in common is JIS X 0208 only’ still continues.” (JIS X 0213:2000, Appendix 1:2004, section 2.9.7)

For Microsoft Windows, the predominant operating system (and hence supplying the predominant desktop environment) in the personal computing sector, the JIS X 0213 repertoire has been included since Windows Vista, released in November 2006. Mac OS X has been compatible with JIS X 0213 since version 10.1 (released in 2001). Many Unix-likes such as Linux can (optionally) support JIS X 0213 if desired. Therefore, it is thought that with time, JIS X 0213 support on personal computers will not be an impediment to its eventual adoption.

Among the drafters of JIS X 0213, there are those who expect to see a mix of JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0213 before any adoption of JIS X 0213 (Satō, 2004). However, JIS X 0208 continues to be used for the present, and many predict it to endure as a standard. There are barriers that need to be overcome if JIS X 0213 is to supplant JIS X 0208 in common usage:

• The character repertoires utilized in Japanese mobile phones at the present time are based on JIS X 0208. There are no officially announced plans whatsoever to migrate these to JIS X 0213 compatibility. As mobile phones are now a pervasive aspect of Japanese textual communication (see Japanese mobile phone culture), being a widespread, commonly accessed medium for sending e-mail and accessing the World Wide Web, a lack of adoption for mobile phones deters usage elsewhere.
• JIS X 0213 is not strictly upward-compatible with JIS X 0208. For large-scale archives (e.g. bibliographic databases and Aozora Bunko) that use JIS X 0208 and follow its unification criteria strictly, it is thought that it would be extremely difficult work to both convert all the data to JIS X 0213 and preserve the integrity of the text.
• In practice, many systems define and use unassigned code points in JIS X 0208. For example, Windows assigns IBM extended characters and user-defined character areas, and mobile phones assign emoji in some such places. The code points of these gaiji conflict with the code points that JIS X 0213 codes use, so there would be some difficulty in migrating these systems from JIS X 0208 to JIS X 0213. There are also plans to migrate to UCS/Unicode and use the JIS X 0213 repertoire from there, but until a system administrator is able to judge that the implementations of UCS/Unicode surrogate pairs and character compositions are sufficiently stable, he or she is likely to hesitate to use the repertoire of JIS X 0213 that requires those implementations.
• The improvements to provided by JIS X 0213 are mostly in the realm of characters that are not used as often as the ones already present in JIS X 0208. Because there are nearly twice as many glyphs that need to be implemented for less usage of those extra glyphs, it can be a low return on investment in many cases, especially where resources are constrained.