< text , standard > (SIP) The third plane (plane 2) defined in Unicode / ISO 10646 , designed to hold all the ideographs descended from Chinese writing (mainly found in Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese) that aren't found in the Basic Multilingual Plane . The BMP was supposed to hold all ideographs in modern use; unfortunately, many Chinese dialects (like Cantonese and Hong Kong Chinese) were overlooked; to write these, characters from the SIP are necessary. This is one reason even non-academic software must support characters outside the BMP.
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(2002-06-19)