Hi Jeremy, I found something on that in "Beginning XML" by D. Hunter on page 48, in case you have it :-) It sais that Unicode is designed to cover all of the characters in *any* human language. Also it is recommended to use UTF-16 for any other language that is not English because the file size would be smaller.
These two arabic sites however use charset=windows-1256: http://www.aljazeera.net/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/news/ http://www.arabynet.com uses UTF-8: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html" charset="UTF-8"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="AR"> Regarding the reverse flow: "Unicode includes the default writing mode for each character. Thus, Arabic is automatically presented right-to-left. If you want it presented left-to-right, you need to use the bidi-overide attriute of fo:inline. This also allows you to embed left-to-rigth text into right-to-left data (e.g., English words embedded in an Arabic stream)." http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200201/msg01289.html This thread on a multilangauge experiment could be interesting too: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200004/msg00395.html What international encodings are supported by Xerces-J? ISO Latin Arabic (ISO-8859-6) EBCDIC Arabic (ebcdic-cp-ar1) http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/faq-general.html#faq-6 And more... <value xml:lang="AR">جدول</value> Mapping: <mapping id="iso-8859_6-1999"> <display xml:lang="en" name="Arabic (8859-6)" /> <alias name="iso-8859-6" preferredBy="MIME" /> </mapping> http://xml.coverpages.org/unicode22-SampleAliases2.xml This might be useful to you too: This shows how to use the xml:lang attribute to indicate to a search engine where to find the Arabic version of a document. <link title="The manual in Arabic" rel="alternate" xml:lang="ar" href="http://example.com/manual/arabic.html"/> http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xhtml2-20021211/mod-link.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200004/msg00445.html Ok, exotic... SVG in arabic: http://www.zvon.org/HowTo/Output/BEtestsuite_structure-lang-BE-08.php Regards, Ines * -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- * Von: Jeremy Quinn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] * Gesendet: Mittwoch, 8. Januar 2003 13:04 * An: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Betreff: Cocoon webpage in Arabic * * * Dear All, * * I just found out yesterday that I have to have a page in Arabic on a * site I am working on that is otherwise in English, with a bit * of French * and Spanish (using UTF-8). * * I have never worked in non-latin languages before! * * Can anyone advise me what kind of issues I will face? * * Does utf-8 cover Arabic? * Are there different 'xml:lang' specifiers for different forms * of Arabic? Do you have to do anything special in the * generated HTML to reverse the * text-flow? * * Please excuse my extreme ignorance! * * Thanks for any help. * * regards Jeremy * * * --------------------------------------------------------------------- * Please check that your question has not already been answered in the * FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> * * To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * * --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>