Microsoft, being the main producer of operating systems and applications for personal computers for about a half century, had a lot of impact on Arabic and Computing. This article details some of that impact, both from the technology point of view, as well as from the business angle.

This page provides a historical overview on how computers handled Arabic in the past, and how it is handled at present.

Until a few years ago, I held to the position that using graphics to display Arabic on the internet is the most portable way of presentation. I no longer hold this view, since the technology has evolved, and we do have solutions to this now. However, my old position below is kept for historical purposes.The only truely portable form of Arabic on the internet, is a picture with Arabic in Graphics. This means that the page to be published can be scanned to a .GIF or .JPG file and published as an image.This can be read by any graphical browser on any platform.

A sizable population of web developers write their sites pretending that only one browser exists (Microsoft Internet Explorer) on one Operating System (Windows).This is a terrible mistake that even large web sites fall into. Even Al Jazeera did so until they overhauled their site in late 2004.

Can you understand this?

"9aba7 el kheir...Ya alf nhar abya'9"

This says in Arabic:

يا صباح الخير ... يا ألف نهار أبيض

Most of the time, translation can be a good thing since it exposes a whole new audience to material that they otherwise would nothave access to.Sometimes translation can be a sure way of losing the true meaning of a certain text.Bad translation can result from:

The following is a list of sites that would be interesting for those who want to read Arabic on the internet, or would want to research the technology behind it further.

Background

People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to Times 1997 article), making it the Fifth language in the world.

The following is a table of Arabic letters, with the Latin transliteration equivalent in internet 'slang'.

Now that the 2004 Presidential Elections are over and Bush has won, there are a lot of interesting facts, rumors, analysis and the like.