Small grievances
It wasn’t until I moved out of the US that I began slowly to realize the general lack of awareness within America of the challenges developers (should) face and address when building multi-cultural websites or applications. Microsoft writes books on the topic but seemingly few people read them. I sometimes get the impression that, in particular for websites or applications published only in English, American developers tend to think, it’s all the same language, how hard can it be for someone in Europe to use this? “Obvious” differences between cultures like date/time formatting, number formatting, and printer paper size are usually ignored - sometimes because the developers aren’t even aware a difference exists or, even worse, because they consider the difference immaterial.
My grievance today is related to a “cultural oversight” bug in the immensely popular, open-source blogging tool I use, WordPress. (more…)