A 10:30 99-06-29 -0700, Sandra O'donnell USG a écrit :
>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.
[Alain] I could not agree more with Sandra.
That said, for the records, we had a discussion in the beginnings of
ISO/IEC SC22/WG20 (ISO standards committee dedicated to i18n, i.e.
internationalization [i followed by 18 letters followed by n]) and for some
people (a minority, but that exists), i18n was the total opposite of what
we are doing now. It was about making everybody grey in the universe, using
ASCII, English only (BBC's English or Tennesse's, that is the question (;
), metric system (or is it... English system, and which one?) and ISO
conventions wall-to-wall (well trouble began there, for some it was
American conventions worldwide wall-to-wall)...
Fortunately today i18n is unthinkable without its corollary l10n
(localization)...
... a core engine (software or multimedia product, or even hardware) of
culturally-unbiased (as far as possible, and that is easier said than done)
product elements that you slighlty "customize" to fit the user
expectations. This field ought to be better designated as "cultural and
linguistic adaptability" as recently ISO named it and made it a strategic
direction. It is also a question of survival for e-commerce, language and
culture being the ultimate barrier that may be bigger to trespass than iron
fences.
International uniformity just becomes in this model just a "locale" like
others, a locale that may reasonably make more sense in a really worldwide
circle of consenting people.
Like Unicode, eventually, there are universal things toward which we might
converge. But that won't be all, and certainly not overnight.
Nature also loves diversity. It hates degenerating-prone uniformity. In
medio stat virtus. Unification has some goodies... Nobody would like the
hydrogen atom to take liberties... And this simplicity and uniformity is
necessary for building blocks. Complexity is not like an inert gas that
occupies all the universe, it is about elaborated and diverse structures,
more and more elaborated, more and more complex, united in their essence.
Alain LaBonté
Québec
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