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. It seems that the developers of this tool have designed it in such a way, that every quotation mark following a number is altered to be a special kind of quotation mark. For example: “1” is altered to be “1″. (version 2.2) What in the world is going on here, I asked myself in frustration after finally concluding this must be a WordPress bug.
You Americans out there might already understand, but I didn’t figure it out until someone told me: a special allowance for the US “inches” notation was built into the WordPress blog generator. In America, a lone number followed by a quotation mark indicates a number of inches. Not like anyone anywhere else in the world uses this!! But there you have it, some zealous developer out there wanting to serve his countrymen built this into WordPress, blissfully ignorant (or unminding) of users of the application anywhere else in the world. Go figure.
on June 26th, 2007 at 22:24
i know what you meen and i have seen similar problems every were on other US sites. its a pity but some day they might think…. hey but what about the rest of the world ^.-
on June 27th, 2007 at 9:52
Hello Cheryl,
Probably not the best place to post this, but I can think of a link between trying to understand American Football and other multicultural differences :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_football
Dirk
on June 28th, 2007 at 13:41
>Microsoft writes books on the topic but seemingly few people read them.
because they are crap. my company is paying for my MS SQL Server cert and the books are useless exercises in memorization. You learn more from actually doing it than spending hours reading 5 chapters that tell you how to backup the server.
>blissfully ignorant
i disagree. i think its more along the lines of “arrogant ignorance”.
we are the center of the world, therefore other cultures should accomodate us, and if we happen to build/develop non-mono-cultural features that benefit anyone outside our borders, its because we’re being sensitive and went out of our way, not because it’s an accident.
i live here and i can’t get over how people are. maybe its because i live in texas. anyhow, i’m bound for new zealand as soon as we attack iran or another false flag op hits a major city.
on June 28th, 2007 at 13:52
hey,
my “end sarcasm” comment didn’t make it?!
“less than” / sarcasm “greater than”
ack…
on June 30th, 2007 at 20:12
fyi..they supposedly have come up with an update…2.2.1 that was supposed to fix some of this little things. I have no idea if it will affect the number/quotes/inches issue. I just hope some of my plugins will start working again. ugh.