ISO/IEC 8859-8

ISO-8859-8: Latin/Hebrew
MIME / IANAISO-8859-8
Alias(es)iso-ir-138, hebrew, csISOLatinHebrew[1]
Language(s)Hebrew, English
StandardISO/IEC 8859-8, ECMA-121, SI 1311
Classificationextended ASCII, ISO 8859
Based onDEC Hebrew (8-bit), ISO/IEC 8859-1
Other related encoding(s)Windows-1255

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]

  1. ^ Character Sets, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), 2018-12-12
  2. ^ "Code page 916 information document". Archived from the original on 2017-02-16.
  3. ^ "CCSID 916 information document". Archived from the original on 2014-11-29.
  4. ^ "CCSID 5012 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-27.
  5. ^ van Kesteren, Anne. "9. Legacy single-byte encodings". Encoding Standard. WHATWG. Note: ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I are distinct encoding names, because ISO-8859-8 has influence on the layout direction. And although historically this might have been the case for ISO-8859-6 and "ISO-8859-6-I" as well, that is no longer true.
  6. ^ John, Nicholas A. (2013). "The Construction of the Multilingual Internet: Unicode, Hebrew, and Globalization". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 18 (3): 321–338. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12015. ISSN 1083-6101. Background: the problem of Hebrew and the Internet
  7. ^ "Usage Statistics of ISO-8859-8 for Websites, January 2019". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2019-01-17.