Re: Why do MIME imlementations sometimes fail

On Sunday, September 28, 2003, at 01:24  AM, ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:

> But is this a peculiarly American problem? I'm sorry, but I don't think so. In
> fact, in my experience the bias towards localization (or if you prefer,
> unilingualism) committed by Americans is no worse than what's been done
> elsewhere.

You're certainly right here -- most software developers are monolingual whether or not they're Americans.  It's just that most of them are Americans, hence my hasty overgeneralization.

> Humph. I don't know if it counts, but the software I work on personally is
> internationalized, not localized. 

Well, I fully believe that this is the intention, and not being familiar with that software I of course can't say that it doesn't do it well.  I'm just saying that I haven't yet personally seen any software that I thought did it well -- and I work nowadays for a company that puts a lot of time into trying to do so.  Maybe I'm too picky, but I think there are precious few user interfaces that do a good job of making it easy to write in *one* language, and I have yet to see one that I would endorse as doing a good job of more than one.

Again, this is completely a question of me being critical of the user interface, and I think the role of standards here is minor at best.  -- Nathaniel