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Really? I have. In some circles (e.g., the IETF), i18n is an ancient acronym. People who've worked on operating systems (e.g., OS X, Solaris, RHEL, whatever) have to deal with L10N (localization). G11N (globalization) is I18N + L10N. And then there's a11y: accessibility. This is all about making user interfaces accessible for people with low or no vision, low or no hearing, difficulty typing, and so on. There are generally applicable laws requiring G11N and A11Y, and these fall heavily on OS vendors, which is why people who've worked on OSes tend to know these acronyms. I18N -> dealing with Unicode in general, codeset conversions, font issues, ... L10N -> dealing with translating system/application messages to the users' preferred languages (and how to even know they preferences) (think locales) G11N -> I18N and L10N. Localization is damned difficult. There's all sort of little bothersome things, like how to format numbers (which varies quite a lot) and dates (can't we all just use ISO-8601?!). And translating printf-like format strings is often non-trivial, especially when the coder doesn't stop to think about just how hard they might be to a translator as they write their code. |
That's a new one to me, but makes sense. I've been lucky enough to have heard of i19n and l10n for years (almost decades, and this point) but not had to deal with it much beyond tracking down a string in some open source webapp I was patching before deploying.
> can't we all just use ISO-8601?!
Preach on. I sometimes find myself filling out date fields in paper forms in YYYY-MM-DD without thinking. The elementary school my kids attend probably thinks I'm a weirdo. I know my wife does...