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Re: A call for arms - the future of Hebrew in the digital age



>The person who wrote that figure was Doron Shikmoni and his email
>address leads me to believe he is too a reliable source on Internet
>affairs...

It was me. The 99% was more a figure of speech than a figure of statistics.
It means "pretty close" or "similar for most practical purposes, though
not formally conformant".

>The question here in my view is "who controls the standard?" Is it some
>official body of the Israeli government (e.g. Ministry of
>communication), a public organization (e.g.ISOC-IL) or a non-israeli
>based corporation (e.g. M$)

These are international standards regarding bi-directional language
encoding (Hebrew is not alone - Arabic is there, with some market
potential there). As mentioned a few times, the Unicode consortium
(*not* controlled by MS..), adopted this encoding scheme a while ago,
also formalizing and publishing it. They were not the only ones and not
the first ones. The Standards Institute of Israel adopts this method
too (and until recently, MS hardly took part in SII meetings...).

>It is the same, so I believe, as the difference between coding a program
>that can read M$-Word DOC files and a program that reads Postscript
>files - you can do both, but I am sure you all get the difference.

Very true.

>If you say that the standard of implicit hebrew is NOT controlled by m$,
>but rather they are the only one using it then:
>a. I was not aware of that (one learns new things every day) and judging
>from the replies I got not many do.

Again, very true (and unfortunate).

>b. I call the Jihad off ;-)
>c. I am very interested to know who owns it, or is it "in the public
>domain"?

International standards are just that - open, international standards.
You may need to pay to buy the physical document, but there is no
royalty on the standard.

>This being the case, I think everybody here who gives a damn about this
>issue (and judging from the replies I got I would say there are some
>peoples here) should go and contribute to the Mozilla
>internationalization effort. I, at lest, am going to do just that.

The above point is the reason why I took the liberty of leaving this
on the list (while off topic). This is what I was after - and I'd be
very pleased to see any Israeli participation in the i18n effort of
Netscape! This will bring Linux back into the picture on the Hebrew
track. Go ahead!

Doron Shikmoni

PS: About a year ago, a large document was prepared for the government,
    titled "Israel's preparation for the information age" (free translation).
    It has 10 chapters, each prepared by a special committee, on very
    different major subjects. One of the committees (that I had the honor
    of chairing) dealt specifically with the issue of Hebrew adaptation.
    You may want to read the chapter - the document is available (I think)
    on the Knesset web site.