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 series of ASCII-based standard
character encodings. 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 Jewish ...
, but no
Hebrew vowel signs. IBM assigned
code page
In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some co ...
916 (
CCSIDs 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
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...
preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the
C0 and C1 control codes from
ISO/IEC 6429. 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 Encoding Standard used by
HTML5 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 (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
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
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 (₪). It adds support for
vowel points as combining characters, and some additional punctuation.
Over a decade after the publication of that standard,
Unicode is preferred, at least for the Internet (meaning
UTF-8, 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
The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists ...
,
new shekel
The new Israeli shekel ( he, שֶׁקֶל חָדָשׁ '; ar, شيكل جديد ; currency symbol, sign: Shekel sign, ₪; ISO 4217, ISO code: ILS; abbreviation: NIS), also known as simply the Israeli shekel ( he, שקל ישראלי, ar, ش ...
sign and more advanced
explicit bidirectional formatting.
See also
*
8-bit DEC Hebrew
The DEC Hebrew character set is an 8-bit character set developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to support the Hebrew alphabet. It was derived from DEC's Multinational Character Set (MCS) by removing the existing definitions from code p ...
(similar DEC code page)
*
Code page 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 ...
(similar Windows code page)
*
SI 960
The Israeli Standards Institute's Standard SI 960 defines a 7-bit Hebrew code page. It is derived from, but does not conform to, ISO/IEC 646; more specifically, it follows ASCII except for the lowercase letters and backtick (`), which are repla ...
*
7-bit DEC Hebrew
The Israeli Standards Institute's Standard SI 960 defines a 7-bit Hebrew code page. It is derived from, but does not conform to, ISO/IEC 646; more specifically, it follows ASCII except for the lowercase letters and backtick (`), which are replac ...
References
External links
ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999* Revisions of the
ECMA
Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...
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