Nadav Har'El wrote:
iso-8859-8 (without -i), the "visual order", is the old encoding used in legacy applications that had no bidi support. There's no reason to use it nowadays, and especially not in long plain texts (documents, emails, etc.).
It is unfortunate that the standard bodies chose to make the unadorned
encoding name (iso-8859-8) the obsolete one, and to make the one with an
extra "-i" to be the one of choice. This often causes confusion, with
"iso-8859-8" being used colloquially as a synonym for iso-8859-8-i.
Both the last sentences are not exactly accurate.
Unicode defined ISO-8859-8 as the Hebrew 8 bit encoding. They also defined that to display Hebrew you need to use the BiDi reordering algorithm. It therefor follows, strict standard compliance speaking, that ISO-8859-8 is logical Hebrew.
HOWEVER, during the early days of the browser wars, Netscape could only display visual Hebrew. Pages written for Netscape usually used the "ISO-8859-8" encoding. IE could display logical Hebrew, and pages written for it usually used the Windows-1255 encoding. A convention was formed that ISO-8859-8 means visual Hebrew, while Windows-1255 means logical Hebrew.
When logical Hebrew became popular, people wanted to use ISO-8859-8 for logical Hebrew pages. The ugly hack was to define a new encoding called "ISO-8859-8-I". It is not defined in any standard I'm aware of, and it's definitely not defined that ISO-8859-8 means visual ordering. This is merely a convention that all HTML based clients follow.
As far as I know, ISO-8859-8-I does not exist outside the HTML/Mime world, and ISO-8859-8 does mean logical Hebrew there.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. http://www.lingnu.com/
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