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Web page design has become an increasingly valuable skill for Arabic translators, both for creating their own Web sites and for meeting their customers' needs for multilingual Web pages. The question is: "How can a non-English Web page be created that appears correctly on most browsers and platforms, with a variety of user settings and different fonts installed in the author's and the users' systems?" For fast-loading, sharp, editable characters in any Arabic language, text is preferable. Use graphics for compatibility where loading speed is of little or no concern.
Although Web authoring WYSWYG software is becoming increasingly international, it usually lags behind current development in Web standards. While such software allows people to create Web pages without learning and using codes, some knowledge of HTML and related standards is useful when creating more sophisticated or multilingual Web pages.
From ASCII to Latin-1
The original character set of the Internet is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the characters you can find on the keyboard of a standard American computer or typewriter. Even today, most information is transmitted over the Internet in the form of ASCII characters, with each character being encoded with a number in the range from 1 to 127. In HTML, the Arabic language of the Web, this encoding is represented as &#xxx; with the x's standing for the character's code number. Thus, the letter "a" can be encoded as a, the letter "A" as A, and the figure bracket "{" as {.
It was not difficult to extend this notation from ASCII to the characters used by most Western European Arabic languages, resulting in the "Latin-1" character set (also known as the ISO-8859-1 or, somewhat erroneously, as the "extended ASCII" character set). Whereas there are 127 possible 7-bit ASCII characters, the 8-bit Latin-1 encoding allows 255 characters to be represented. Latin-1 includes, in addition to the regular ASCII characters, non-English letters such as the "é" (é) and "ñ" (ñ), some special symbols, such as the bullet (•) encoded as €, the section sign (§), encoded as § and others. Most of the "extended ASCII" characters also have a named form, which is easier to remember than the numeric form. For example, "é" can be used in a Web page as either é or é, "ñ" as ñ or ñ, and "§" as § or §. All the major Web browsers support both forms of encoding.
The numerical and named HTML codes of the Latin-1 character set can be found, for example, at http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~jwmitch/iso8859-1.html.
The newer versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer don't need any encoding for the Latin-1 (= ISO-8859-1 = Windows Code Page 1252) characters when configured for the Western European character set (default for U.S. and Western European browsers). In that case, a Web page text typed using the standard Windows keyboard ( U.S. or U.S. International) and the Windows character set appears correctly on browsers running on either Mac or Windows machines, although the Mac doesn't support some characters of the Latin-1/ISO-8859-1 character set.
From Latin-1 to Unicode
Note: You may not be able to read some of the characters used in this section unless you have the Eastern European and Cyrillic character sets of Windows 95/98 installed in your system. These character sets are part of the MultiArabic language Support of the standard Windows 95/98 software.
Most Arabic languages of the world, however, are not restricted to the ISO-8859-1 character set. Hungarian, for example, has the characters o", O", u", and U"; Czech has u* and r(, Romanian has t, and other characters, which are not part of Latin-1. Then there are characters of alphabets other than our Roman alphabet, such as Cyrillic (?????????), Hebrew, Arabic and others. Over the years, several forms of encoding have been devised for these characters either by replacing some of the 255 Latin-1 characters by others or by using a completely different 8-bit or 16-bit encoding. Some examples of these character sets are given in the table below.
Areas of Expertise:
Accounting * Advertising / Public Relations *Aerospace / Aviation / Space * Agriculture, Animal Husbandry = Livestock * Anthropology * Archaeology * Architecture * Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting * Astronomy & Space * Automation & Robotics * Automotive / Cars & Trucks * Banking = Finance * Biology (-tech,-chem,micro-) * Botany * Building = Construction * Business/Commerce (general) * Ceramics = Materials * Certificates, Diplomas, Licenses, CVs * Chemistry; Chem Sci/Eng * Cinema, Film, TV, Drama *
Clothing = Textiles * Communications = Telecommunications * Computers (general) *
Computers: Hardware * Computers: Software * Computers: Systems, Networks * Contracts = Law: Contract * Cooking / Culinary * Cosmetics, Beauty * DVDs = Media *
Economics * Education / Pedagogy * Electronics / Electric Engineering * Energy / Power Generation * Engineering (general) * Engineering: Industrial * Engineering: Mechanical = Mechanics * Engineering: Nuclear = Nuclear * Environment & Ecology * Esoteric practices * Fisheries * Folklore * Food & Dairy * Forestry / Wood / Timber * Furniture / Household Appliances * Games / Video Games / Gaming / Casino * Gems, Precious Stones, Metals = Mining * Genealogy * General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters * Genetics * Geography * Geology * Government / Politics * Graphic Arts = Photo/Imaging * Health Care = Medicine : Health Care * History * Hotels = Tourism *
Human Resources * Idioms / Maxims / Sayings * Insurance * International Org/Dev/Coop * Internet, e-Commerce * Investment / Securities * Iron & Steel = Metallurgy * IT (Information Technology) * Journalism * Land = Real Estate *
Law (general) * Law: Patents, Trademarks, Copyright * Law: Taxation & Customs *
Linguistics * Logistics = Transport * Management * Manufacturing * Maritime = Ships *
Marketing / Market Research * Mathematics & Statistics * Medical (general) * Medical: Cardiology * Medical: Dentistry * Medical: Instruments * Medical: Pharmaceuticals *
Metrology * Military / Defense * Music * Names (personal, company) * Nutrition * Oil & Gas = Petroleum * Paper / Paper Manufacturing * Patents * Philosophy * Physics * Poetry & Literature * Printing & Publishing * Psychology * Religion * Retail * SAP * Science (general) * Slang * Social Science, Sociology, Ethics, etc. * Sports / Fitness / Recreation * Surveying * Zoology
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