At 08:05 -0700 03-09-27, Dave Crocker wrote:
JP> The main reason for this problem is, in my belief, that
JP> implementors live in the U.S.A. and do not meet this
JP> problem themselves.
Perhaps you have some data to support this rather interesting theory?
My theory is that software development often is done in
stages as follows:
(1) Developing a version which works for English.
(2) Localization = modifying the software to work for
other languages.
And that (2) is often done on a very tight time schedule
and sometimes by different people than those who developed
the English version of the software.
This means that (2) will often solve the obvious problems,
but that non-obvious problems, which crop up only in user
testing, are often recognized when the "Localization" time
slot for a new release of the software is already passed.
The only data I have to support this theory is certain
contacts I have had with the people doing the localization
work for some software products.
Software gets good only through feed-back from actual
users, and problems of non-English users may not easily
reach the ears of developers in such ways that it can make
new releases work later. For example, the "localization"
team may only be active during the actual time of doing the
localization, and will then not be able to get problem
reports from users, since the team is not working any more
when the user problems occur.
One interesting thing I have noted is that localized
software often works well when a user only uses his
national language, but not when a local user wants to use
another language than his own. For example, the software I
use is of the opinion that the decimal separator should be
a comma (,), and makes it somewhat difficult for me to
create content in English where the decimal separator
should be a period (.).
At 11:25 -0400 03-09-27, Keith Moore wrote:
And in fact, it's still possible. Nothing stops Jacob or anyone else from
defining a new type of body part that supports text of multiple character
encodings. The challenge is in making it technically sound and enough of a
win over HTML (which is already widely supported) that people want to
implement it and use it.
Are not Japanese people already doing this in order to
allow Japanese e-mail to contain a mixture between English
and Japanese text, by using ISO 2022 character set switch
marks in the text.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/