Arab News Folder

Al-Moharer International - Home Page

Al Manar Television

AlHayat Home Page

Asharq Al Awsat Home Page

Arabic 2000.com : Arabic Newspapers and Magazines

An-Nahar, the Lebanese Nwespaper This site supports ISO-8859-6, the Arabic code page used by Macs and Unix. Text is also presented in PDF format.

QUDS PRESS SERVICE

SRM Home Page

Arab TV and Radio on the Web

LBC TV news Live

ANA Radio Live

The Arab Corner: Arab TV & Radio

Tunisia National Radio, The News

Tunisia National TV, The News

Arabic Language Institutes

Arab film links

Welcome to August Light Productions

http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/ccas/lookfilm.htm

Arab Film Festival:All Films

Arab Film Distribution Home Page

Arab Film Festival 1998

Teaching Arabic Links

ATLAS Symposium

Languages and Linguistics

Al Kitaab I

American Association of Teachers of Arabic

Arabic SW support on WWW

Arabic Home Page

Arabic ISO 8859-6 Web page links

Ayna? - How to view Arabic pages (MAC)

Diwan: Arabic Software for the Mac

KnowledgeView home

Language Systems for Arabic and Islamic Software

Nicholas Heer's Home Page

Products_frame

مقتطفات This is the Sakhr Software Company Web site in Egypt.

Welcome to ayna - اçنا è سçنا انé اêو

Xerox Research Centre Europe: Arabic Input

Islamic Sites

ISLAM ISLAM ISLAM ISLAM

THE ISLAM PAGE

The Whole Dunya Bookstore: All the Knowledge That Fits

Palestine Stuff

Law Society Home Page

Welcome to Palestine!

Center for Research & Documentation

PASSIA: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs - JerusalemPASSIA: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs

UNSCO

PALESTINE.ON.LINE

ICAS MEPP Page

PalEcon: Home Page

PALESTINIAN PALESTINE ARABIC ARAB

Palestinian Research Institutes and Centers

PDIN/PRRN Bulletin Board

Personnel of the United Nations Development Programme

Personnel of the United Nations Development Programme

Gush Shalom - recommended links

Hebron Home Page

Iraq Activism

Contents

Salaam.org

Iraq Action Message Board

ADC Ann Arbor

Depleted Uranium Report

Medicine for Iraq

International Action Center Homepage

Salam Review

Human Rights Page

Iraq's WWW Sites

Iraq Action Coalition

Berber language and culture on the Web

TAMAZIGHT, un rژpertoire de sites amazighes

Berber Culture Directory

University Mid-East Sites

ACSweb American University in Cairo

Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS)University of Michigan

MIT Arab Student Organization's Home Page

Arabic Bookstores

Arabic Book Center

Leila Books

Schoenhof's - Languages

Smitskamp Oriental Antiquarian Booksellers Homepage

Various Other Links

I guess people who aren't well-versed in the ins and outs of Arabic Web-browsing might need a little word of explanation. There are two incompatible character-set standards in general use today for Arabic in the world of personal computing. One is ISO 8859-6, which is sort of based on what we used to call ASCII, with an agreed upon 8-bit mapping for values between 128-255 which correspond to specific Arabic symbols. This character-set mapping was agreed upon by the UN standards committee which is currently called the International Standards Orgnization. It has a vague resemblance to the 7-bit mapping that had been agreed upon by the now disbanded UN committee CCITT (Commite Consultatif International pour Telephone et Telegraph?) in its proposed standard for Arabic Interchange characters defined in the document CCITT-52. By flipping on bit-8 of each Arabic character in your file you can transfer your CCITT-52 characters into ISO-8859-6, more or less. From perusing the literature I'm not even sure if CCITT-52 ever saw much use.

The ISO 8859-6 character set is the one used by Unix systems and by the Macintosh Arabic Language kit. As long as you have Arabic support on your computer AND you are using a Macintosh or Unix, you can view ISO-8859-6 Web documents by selecting an Arabic font inside of Netscape and things will, more or less, be alright.

Microsoft with its killer market share, however, chose not to follow the ISO-8859-6 character set and invented one of their very own, which they called CP-1256. I find this rather puzzling. They followed the ISO 8859-n (5 or 7, I think) character for Hebrew, but they invented their own, CP-1251, for Cyrillic and their own non-standard character mappings for a couple of other non-Latin alphabet orthographies. My only guess is that they were trying to make it a bit more difficult for folks in those countries who might want to use a non-Windows-based machine. What with Microsoft's current bail-out of Apple, I don't know how much weight I can give to this explanation.

Using Windows you can with either Netscape or the Microsoft Windows 95 browser (I forget its name) read any Arabic documents created with the CP-1256 Arabic character set, by selecting your Arabic font under the appropriate Options' menu. Sakhr Software in Egypt has a plug-in for Netscape and their own browser I believe, which will let you read the ISO-8859-6 Arabic character set using the Windows operating system on an Intel processor based machine. There are some other browsers for Windows which can read ISO-8859-6, but unfortunately neither your vanilla Netscape nor the Microsoft browser will display Arabic documents written using ISO-8859-6.

So, now we have two different and incompatible (Arabic diglossia in the world of DataCom?) character sets for Arabic on the Web. As a Macintosh user, I put most of my stuff up using 8859-6, and then use a little utility to convert my 8859-6 into Microsoft's CP-1256 character mapping. This means that I don't get to see my CP-1256 documents and that makes it difficult for me to catch any mistakes. At this point in time I don't see any choice but to put up all documents in both formats and let the user choose which format they are using. The other choices which people have opted for are to:

1. scan their Arabic documents as JPG files. This side-steps the issue of which character set to use, but these image files are large and take a long time to download. Another major drawback is that you cannot search these files for text strings.
2. put their Arabic documents onto the Web as Adobe Acrobat image files (PDF). Again the images take a long time to download, cannot be searched and to top it all off you need to have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, which goes through about three SW revision releases a year.
3. create java applets to display their Arabic documents. My version of Netscape Navigator (3.01) on the Macintosh, does not display any of the implementations of this that I have seen. My version of Netscape Communicator, runs out of memory (32 megabytes), before it can download the entire applet, which causes my machine to crash. I don't consider this an option which is usable to me.

To make things worse, in my not so humble opinion, there is a third character set in the works called Unicode which is not compatible with either of the current character sets. Unicode is also a 16-bit character mapping which will double the size of all character transfers, if not the size of all data files. I think most users do not want to be forced to convert all of their existing character data and double their disk usage at the same time. Unicode has been stalled in various talk-only committees for about 5 years now. Interestingly enough, all three of these character sets preserve the Latin character mapping originally used by the ASCII standard