> Your subject line says you're talking about POSIX, but most of
> the examples you list here are not in POSIX locales. POSIX has
> nothing for measurement units, paper sizes, or terminology like
> "ZIP Code".
The strings in the locale environment variables can also be evaluated by
software to make educated guesses of what the appropriate cultural
conventions are for issues not covered by POSIX locales. . .
In that case, you're complaining about choices that individual
companies/designers make for piggybacking on the locale model.
This has nothing to do with POSIX or the way it has defined
locales.
> BTW, you
> describing the US conventions as "strange." Do you think it's
> appropriate for others to describe German or European conventions
> as "strange?" . . .
. . .
If software insists to label the hours of the day by default with
12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,=
11
\__________________A________________/ \_________________P_______________=
__/
just in order to avoid anyone getting the impression that there is an
unlucky 13th hour of the day (see my recent essay here on the set of
supernatural numbers used by US hotels and air lines), then I will
continue to call this a really strange convention compared to simply
counting them from 0 to 23. . .
Good grief. Software doesn't use am/pm to avoid the 13th hour. Analog
clocks have traditionally had 12 hours on them, and the U.S. convention
simply continues using that. And *software* simply supports what
the largest group of customers expect. Internationalized software
lets users decide for themselves how to see dates and time (and
many other things, of course).
I believe that I prefer European conventions not just because I grew up
there, but because European conventions evolved in an environment of
intensive inter-cultural trade and communication. Europeans have
developed a tendency to quickly replace their old conventions with new
more practical and more efficient ones, as soon as they spot
international incompatibilities. . .
And the U.S. certainly is known as a place where things never
change. Where there's no technological progress. Where there is
no innovation. Where there is no efficiency. Yeah, right.
From a separate message on this thread:
. . . while people in
the US still follow the Roman number tradition and have to start the day
with "hour number XII ante meridian". The problems of the US time notation
are obvious and numerous: . . .
And the problems with a clock that has 24 hours divided into 60
minutes each are pretty obvious, too, but I don't see you complaining
about them. Why aren't you advocating a 10-hour day in which hours
are divided into 100 minutes each? That would be more logical.
What about 10-day weeks instead of the current seven? What about
a calendar where months all have the same number of days instead
of the current mish-mash of 28, 30, and 31? (Say, each of the 12
months having 30 days, and then there being a five-or-six day
extra week to keep the calendar in sync with the sun?)
You complain about "illogic" when it is in others' cultural conventions,
but not in your own.
All cultures have conventions that defy explanation to others, but
that natives consider normal. That's life. And the purpose of i18n
is to make individual users comfortable when they sit down at the
keyboard. There's a long way to go, and some design decisions that
were correct 15 years ago when locales and POSIX were being defined
may not be correct anymore. But I think we'll all get farther if we
produce software that can accommodate others' requirements instead
of bashing some of those requirements.
-----------------------
Sandra Martin O'Donnell
Compaq Computer Corporation
sandra.odonnell@compaq.com
odonnell@zk3.dec.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:47 EDT