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ISO/IEC 8859-8

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, but no Hebrew vowel signs. IBM assigned code page 916 (CCSIDs 916 and 5012) to it.^[2][3][4] 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 from ISO/IEC 6429. The text is (usually) in logical order, so bidi processing is required for display. Nominally ISO-8859-8 (code page 28598) is for “visual order”, and ISO-8859-8-I (code page 38598) is for logical order. But usually in practice, and required for XML documents,^{[citation needed]} ISO-8859-8 also stands for logical order text. The WHATWG Encoding Standard used by HTML5 treats ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I 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.^[5]

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, 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^[6] (meaning UTF-8, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less than 0.1% of websites.^[7]

Code page layout[edit]

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[edit]

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.^[12]

See also[edit]

• 8-bit DEC Hebrew (similar DEC code page)
• Code page 1255 (similar Windows code page)
• SI 960
• 7-bit DEC Hebrew

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999
• Standard ECMA-121 - 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphics Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet
• Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 Archived 2005-11-24 at the Wayback Machine (Hebrew)
• ISO-IR registrations:
  • From ECMA-121:1987 and following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988: European Computer Manufacturers Association (1987-07-31). ISO-IR-138: Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  • Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000: Standards Institution of Israel (1998-05-01). ISO-IR-198: Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  • From SI 1311:2002: Standards Institution of Israel (2004-07-20). ISO-IR-234: Latin/Hebrew character set for 8-bit codes (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.