ISO/IEC 8859-8, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet'', is part of the

ISO/IEC 8859 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12. ...

series of ASCII-based standard

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to Graphics, graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of Language, human language, allowing them to be Data storage, stored, Data communication, transmi ...

s. ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 from 1999 represents its second and current revision, preceded by the first edition ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988 in 1988. It is informally referred to as Latin/Hebrew. ''ISO/IEC 8859-8'' covers all the

Hebrew letters The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewis ...

, but no Hebrew vowel signs. IBM assigned code page 916 (

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and U ...

s 916 and 5012) to it. This character set was also adopted by Israeli Standard SI1311:2002, with some extensions. ISO-8859-8 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the

C0 and C1 control codes The C0 and C1 control code or control character sets define control codes for use in text by computer systems that use ASCII and derivatives of ASCII. The codes represent additional information about the text, such as the position of a cursor, ...

from

ISO/IEC 6429 ISO/IEC JTC 1, entitled "Information technology", is a joint technical committee (JTC) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain and p ...

. The text is (usually) in logical order, so

bidi A bidirectional text contains two text directionalities, right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text direction in eac ...

processing is required for display. Nominally ''ISO-8859-8'' (code page 28598) is for “visual order”, and ISO-8859-8- (code page 38598) is for logical order. But usually in practice, and required for XML documents, ''ISO-8859-8'' also stands for logical order text. The

WHATWG The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, l ...

Encoding Standard used by

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

treats ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8- as distinct encodings with the same mapping due to influence on the layout direction, but notes that this no longer applies to

ISO-8859-6 ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. ...

(Arabic), only to ISO-8859-8. There is also ISO-8859-8-E which supposedly requires directionality to be explicitly specified with special control characters; this latter variant is in practice unused. The Microsoft Windows code page for Hebrew,

Windows-1255 Windows-1255 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to write Hebrew. It is an almost compatible superset of ISO-8859-8 most of the symbols are in the same positions (except for A4, which is 'sheqel sign' in Windows-1255 but 'generic currency ...

, is mostly an extension of ISO/IEC 8859-8 without C1 controls, except for the omission of the double underscore, and replacement of the generic currency sign ( ¤) with the

sheqel sign The shekel sign (₪) is a currency sign used for the Israeli new shekel, which is the currency of Israel. Israeli new shekel (1986–present) The Israeli new shekel is denoted in he, שקל חדש (''šéqel ħadáš'', , lit. "New Shekel") ...

(₪). It adds support for vowel points as combining characters, and some additional punctuation. Over a decade after the publication of that standard,

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

is preferred, at least for the Internet (meaning

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less that 0.1% of websites.

Code page layout

FD is left-to-right mark (U+200E) and FE is right-to-left mark (U+200F), as specified in a newer amendment as ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999.

2002 Israeli Standard extensions

Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 matches ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 except for a number of additional character allocations for the euro sign, new shekel sign and more advanced explicit bidirectional formatting.

References

External links

ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999
* Revisions of the ECMA standard: ** **

Israeli Standard SI1311:2002
(Hebrew) * ISO-IR registrations: ** From ECMA-121:1987 and following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988: ** Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000: ** From SI 1311:2002: {{DEFAULTSORT:ISO IEC 8859-8 ISO/IEC 8859 Computer-related introductions in 1988

Code page layout

2002 Israeli Standard extensions

See also

References

External links