Re: Hebrew patches...

[the duke]

>> Maybe I misunderstood something (all those weird character sets
>> confuse me :).  The current documents have letters encoded in this
>> way:
>>
>> ה Hurd ולינוקס

that was iso-8859-8-I encoding. the "logical hebrew" standard.

>> The document in question looked something like this:
>>
>> \327\234\327\242\327\221\327\250
>>
>> I assumed that the later was UTF-8.

that really is UTF-8. the Unicode standard.

>>  Why the difference?

with iso-8859-8-I we can see hebrew characters and english (latin characters), 
if we set the browser (or any other viewer) to interpret it using the 
iso-8859-8-I encoding. On the other hand, if we'll tell it to interpret the 
text using Shift_JIS (a japanese standard), we'll see japanese characters and 
latin characters. The japanese characters, of course, will form gibberish, 
since it wasn't supposed to be interpreted as japanese.

The problem is that if I want to create a document which includes japanese AND 
hebrew, iso-8859-8-I says "no can do". It just doesn't include the characters 
for that. That seems not so important, since not many documents include 
japanese and hebrew. But the same problem exists with French, German, and Greek 
characters, and those DO appear in many english documents.

That's why we have UTF-8 (Unicode). There I can have Latin, Japanese, Hebrew, 
Greek, Kazakhstanian, Soumi (and in future version, maybe even ancient 
egyptian) and others, all living together happily and displayable on any viewer 
that supports UTF-8. And since it is a single standard for all languages, I 
don't have to make sure my system supports hebrew in order to see hebrew. All I 
have to know is that it has UTF-8 support, which it will probably have since it 
is useful for all of the non english speaking world.

And that's why UTF-8 seems a better standard. Not only for the Hebrew 
translation team, but for any translation team. (plus, it will allow us to make 
the language links on the top of pages in their native language, which is a bit 
better than in english. we had a discussion on it in the traslation teams list)

>> Better to use whatever the GNU Hebrew translation team uses...

As the hebrew translation team coordinator I was the one who made the decision 
to use UTF-8.
If someone will give good enough reasons to use another standard, the decision 
might change. Only till now no one gave them :)

That was my too elaborate explanation on "why I use UTF-8". In case you ask me 
something and don't want me to write a book for a reply, as I tend to do for 
some strange reason, write that you need a short answer. Sorry, I'm an 
informative kind of guy, can't help it :)

That's all for the UTF-8 subject. If you have any other questions, feel free to 
ask.

salut!
    the duke
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