The Standard for Arabic Inclusion and Support (Henceforth abbreviated as SAIS) is a group of specifications that should be complied with by a specific application or distribution on the GNU/Linux platform to be declared as 'Arabic Friendly'. To this end, the standard defines Arabization Specification Levels or ASL that are used for certifying an application or distro as supporting Arabic to a certain extent. There are currently two different sets of ASL, one for applications and another for distributions.
The word Arabize is born in 1883. - - Ar*ab*i*za*tion /"ar-&-b&-'zA-sh&n/ noun
a : to cause to acquire Arabic customs, manners, speech, or outlook b : to modify (a population) by intermarriage with Arabs
Arabicize(1)
In this context, a piece of software is said to be Arabized when it supports the Arabic language in reading and writing in addition to various locale-specific information.
Obviously, different applications need different aspects of Arabization, and some points above are more important than others. In particular, the best point upward for the support of the Arabic language is through UTF-8 and the openi18n initiative (http://www.openi18n.org).
Standardization is vital. lack of standardization prevents integration and accumulation of expertise, efforts, and results.
lack of knowledge regarding what the Arabic community wants and what this community sees as partially Arabic supported and what is fully Arabic supported.
Many problems in the support of Arabic are due to sheer ignorance from the side of developers about these problems. We can tell them now through this document to judge their works against these standards and the community can help giving weights or grades to the support level according to this standard.
Developers should be aware of the context-sensitivity of the Arabic alphabet. We should tell them that they have to include "Tashkeel" marks as a basic requirement to get a context-free Arabic written word.
Announcing our drafts/standards for things which is not standardized yet. Example: the mapping proposed by Muhammad Sameer of the Holy Quran marks in Unicode.
There are many points that should be discussed within the community and that warrant future standardization. Examples are the treatment of different locales, identifying the minimum set of tashkeel necessary to preserve the context-free property, whether a software that does not support tashkeel will be regarded as supporting Arabic and to which extent.
A mechanism should be created within the Arabic speaking community for drafting such standard and submitting them to various standardization bodies and internationalization communities.