Newswatch

Oh, just a couple of links we’ve run across:

There’s now an entire Weblog on internationali{s,z}ation/locali{s,z}ation: Liga. It’s still pretty new. We’ll see how it goes. Certainly we couldn’t be working in a more ironically-named field. Why is“abbreviation” such a long word? Why are both“internationalization” and “localization”spelled two different ways in national English variants, and why are they so long they are given their own postal-code-like abbreviations, i18nand l10n?We lay odds that Jim Carrollwon’t be along for this ride.
It probably bores your arse off even to consider it, butcharacter encoding is an eternal bugbear in Web content – in languages other than English, anyway. (If all you ever write are the characters visible on an American computer keyboard, skip this section.) Eventually you’re going to have to deal with writing a zed with an acute accent or differentiating a beta from an estset. The place to start is chezJukka Korpela. He writes English in that very restrained and correct way Nordic second-language learners do, and his vast network of pages will teach you more in less time than you could ever imagine. One problem: His main site just got nuked by his former employer. There are now three mirror sites (first, second, third). The piece on character encoding is here.
Apparently there’s some kind of multilingual HTML editor for Macs called Muwse (perverse Japanese orthography). It requires a vast array of installed language kits to work properly.And in practice, few sites, if any, require mixed Japanese and Arabic on the same page.

Posted on 2001-02-16