Folks, There seems to be some serious confusion here. Can I try to help.
ISO 8859-8 denotes a character set (part of the ISO 8859 standard). As such, it does not carry any directionality information. What you have been discussing, the strings ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-I (and, incidentally, also ISO-8859-E), are registered values of the "Charset" directive of MIME (and derived HTTP headers). These strings have a _dual_function_ - they carry both character set *and* directionality information with them. (I won't get into why they were registered this way - long story - ask if you're interested). They were registered as part of the writing of RFC1555/RFC1556. As a result, ISO-8859-8 implies ISO 8859-8 characters with Visual Directionality, ISO-8859-8-I implies ISO 8859-8 characters with Implicit (Unicode, aka "logical") Directionality (and -E implies Explicit Directionality which is now virtually extict). This applies to plain text mail (see RFC1555/6, and Israeli Standard SI1904). It was also carried into HTTP and HTML (set up a page whose HTTP Charset is ISO-8859-8 and see what happens - with any conforming browser). Hence, W3C mandates it as well (see http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.2.4 for example). Visual directionality is alive and well, contrary to what has been asserted here. It is still being used extensively in HTML (unfortunately, I might add), and a bit less in mail. A mail client that sends plain text with implicit ("logical") directionality and tags it with Charset=ISO-8859-8 is broken. A mail clients that renders plain text with Charset=ISO-8859-8 as implicit ("logical") directionality is similarly broken. So would be browsers which would render HTML brought in with HTTP Charset=ISO-8859-8 (or matching meta tags) as implicit (I don't know of any). Note, again: in the MIME and HTTP/HTML realm, the *strings* ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I carry directionality information. ISO 8859-8 - the character set - does not. Yes, it's confusing. Hope this helps, Doron PS: This belongs to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - because...? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
