| ISO-8859-8: Latin/Hebrew | |
| Lang: | Hebrew, English |
| Mime: | ISO-8859-8 |
| Alias: | iso-ir-138, hebrew, csISOLatinHebrew |
| Standard: | ISO/IEC 8859-8, ECMA-121, SI 1311 |
| Basedon: | DEC Hebrew (8-bit), ISO/IEC 8859-1 |
| Classification: | extended ASCII, ISO 8859 |
| Otherrelated: | 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.[1] [2] [3] 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- (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.[4]
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[5] (meaning UTF-8, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less than 0.1% of websites.[6]
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.[7]