Code page 916
| Company type | Standard |
|---|---|
| Industry | Information technology |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Founder | ISO and IEC |
| Headquarters | International |
Area served | Global |
| Products | Character encoding standard for Latin/Hebrew alphabet |
ISO/IEC 8859-8, titled Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet, is a member of the ISO/IEC 8859 family, which consists of ASCII-based standardized character encoding schemes. The version currently in use, ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999, succeeded the initial 1988 release. Commonly referred to as Latin/Hebrew, this standard encompasses all Hebrew characters but does not include the Hebrew vowel points. IBM designated this encoding as code page 916 (with CCSID identifiers 916 and 5012). Additionally, it was incorporated by the Israeli Standard SI1311:2002, featuring certain enhancements.
When paired with C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429, ISO-8859-8 is recognized by the IANA as the preferred charset name. Typically, text encoded in this set is arranged in logical order, necessitating bidi processing for proper rendering. By definition, ISO-8859-8 (also known as code page 28598) refers to text in “visual order,” whereas ISO-8859-8-Template:Serif (code page 38598) signifies logical order. In practical applications, including XML documents, ISO-8859-8 frequently represents logically ordered text. The WHATWG Encoding Standard, which underpins HTML5, treats ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I as separate encodings due to differences in text directionality—a distinction that no longer applies to Arabic encodings.
There is also a variant called ISO-8859-8-E, which mandates the use of explicit directionality control characters; however, its adoption remains minimal.
The Microsoft Windows Hebrew code page, known as Windows-1255, is an extension of ISO/IEC 8859-8. It enhances support by incorporating vowel points as combining characters and additional punctuation marks, replaces the generic currency symbol with the sheqel sign (₪), and excludes C1 control codes.
Although ISO/IEC 8859-8 played a significant role historically, more than ten years after its release, Unicode, particularly UTF-8 encoding, has become the dominant standard for Internet text representation. Currently, ISO-8859-8 accounts for less than 0.1% of website character encoding usage.
Code page layout
The characters FD and FE represent the left-to-right mark (U+200E) and right-to-left mark (U+200F), respectively, as defined in ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999.
Extensions in the 2002 Israeli Standard
The Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 corresponds to ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 while incorporating extra characters, including the euro symbol (€), the new shekel symbol (₪), and improved explicit bidirectional formatting controls designed to manage intricate text arrangements.
| Remaining Hebrew letters and bidirectional controls |
|---|
| Additional Hebrew letters and bidirectional controls |
|---|
| Bidirectional embedding and marks |
|---|
| Control characters for directionality |
|---|
| Legend |
|---|
See also
- 8-bit DEC Hebrew (a comparable DEC code page)
- Code page 1255 (a similar Windows code page)
- SI 960
- 7-bit DEC Hebrew
External links
- ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999
- Standard ECMA-121 - 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphics Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet
- Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 (Hebrew)
- ISO-IR registrations:
- From ECMA-121:1987 and ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988:
- Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000:
- From SI 1311:2002: