East Asian languages, which use large sets of ideographic characters, present challenges for information technology professionals. Early hardware and software were not capable of handling such data. As these markets began expanding, it became increasingly necessary for developers to come up with ways to support Japanese, Chinese and Korean. The solutions were initially complex and often not compatible with existing systems. The increase in demand for culturally sensitive solutions has led to the development of a number of standards. These standards have greatly simplified development of software and hardware that can support a much wider range of languages, allowing speakers of these languages to have access to many more culturally correct applications.