Ø I think that the standard should be complete without relying on user preferences. There seem to be clear differences in expectation, particularly between Hebrew and Arabic speakers. It is possible to make a standard that is consistent and doesn’t vary. However that standard might “look funny” to some users. Worse, it seems that the preferences are biased by things like how much of a mathematician they are. Probably all people going to http://www.zoo.org aren’t engineers/scientists, and that needs to be friendly to them. I think this is similar to date or time formatting. Yes, that’s “scary”, because we’re talking about an IRI after all, which is Important. However if I get a check for $1.000, the distinction between . and , is also going to be important to me. So an IRI advertising a musical on the side of a bus may be a little fuzzy to me if I don’t understand the culture. However I need to know the culture to know whether to not bother typing in the IRI because 1/9/2011 has already passed, or to make reservations because that’d be a fun thing to do on my birthday. -Shawn
Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 18:17:03 UTC