I'm internationalizing Apache::MP3, and have come up against one problem,
almost the last one left:
At one point, the module figures out the duration of things, and stores
them as like "12m 15s" for 12 minutes 15 seconds. Clearly that's good only
for languages where "m" is the first letter of the word for "minutes" and
"s" is the first letter of the word for "seconds".
So I'm curious: in your experience, is there a decent way to write this
that is acceptable for all languages?
Looking at CDs from outside the US that I have, I see different formats for
a duration of 12 minutes 15 seconds:
12:15 (by far the most common)
12'15
12'15"
12.15
Is 12:15 acceptable to everyone as a good way to write a duration of
12minutes 15 seconds in your respective native languages? I suppose that
it's ambiguous and could mean "12 hours 15 minutes", but in the context of
CD tracks (which is most of what Apache::MP3 is used for), it's fairly
clear from context that it doesn't mean that. (I suppose ":12:15" doesn't
have this problem, but it looks very odd.)
It so happens that it'd take some code reshuffling to have this one bit be
localized for each language, so I'm hoping that I can avoid that by picking
one format (presumably 12:15) that's at least acceptable for most languages.
Does anyone not like 12:15?
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
