Lessons for uncultured web developers | Hacker News Reader

Lessons for uncultured web developers

troyhunt.com

244 pointstroyhunt112 comments

> Why are these US only? It’s a conundrum which we probably don’t regularly need to worry about, but it’s unusual all the same (I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these).

History of the internet: it was invented as a US department of defense research project, and grew into the beast it is today. You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US. Note that .uk exists for the same reason -- it should be .gb, which is the country code, but the UK had already been naming everything with "uk" internally.

So the .edu, .mil, .gov, and .uk got grandfathered in. Others disappeared: ARPA, NATO, Czechoslovakia. People can still register .su domains, if they like -- that's the country code for the Soviet Union.

Once a TLD sees enough use, there's no real way to get rid of it.

.arpa didn't disappear, it changed its purpose.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm curious.

"The domain name arpa is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. It is used exclusively for technical infrastructure purposes. While the name originally was the acronym for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the funding organization in the United States that developed one of the precursors of the Internet (ARPANET), it now stands for Address and Routing Parameter Area."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.arpa

Yes. Used for reverse DNS lookups.

True, though .uk is more correct (Great Britain doesn't include Northern Ireland) and is reserved by the United Kingdom in ISO 3166

I'd agree if it weren't for the confusion it generates, as ISO country codes GB/GBR counter-intuitively don't map to a TLD.

Also, Ukraine got shafted into another mismatch (UA is TLD and ISO alpha-2, UKR is alpha-3), although in their case one could say the country wasn't around when ISO codes were formulated. Some Linux distributions used to have a UK keymap which was... ukrainian. That was a lot of fun to fix (not).

Also, as a citizen of the UK, I really like any move away from the whole "great" in Great Britain. It makes us sound like we’re run by Hafez Aladeen from The Dictator or something.

My favorite TLD was .oz for Australia. Sadly, that one was deleted in the name of "consistency", and we all had to get used to it.

The net was once a fun place managed by smart people, consensus, and working code. Now, a million times larger, all we can hope for is neutrality or ineffectiveness.

> You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US.

The .com tld was created in 1984, at which point there had already been international links for over a decade, so that doesn't really support the argument.

I thought that the links, at the time, went mostly to other networks -- ones running X.25 or something.

X.25 - that is a blast from the past. I think JANET and Autonet had gateways where you could hop from one to the other (ie, TCP/IP to X.25).

The fact that the US doesn't use its country TLD is analogous to the way that the UK doesn't have to specify their country name on their postage stamps.

You get certain privileges for pioneering the development of a communications system, I guess.

Also, the sheer PITA nature of the .us domain, early on, when it was hard to get a .us address if you weren't a state or municipal government.

Another lesson that might be useful is not to assume that the week starts on a particular day.

I live in the UK and the general convention here is the the week on Monday. In find calendars (presumably designed in the US) that start on Sunday particularly frustrating and error-prone. Not being able to customise this is uncultured.

Different cultures have different conventions, and if a seven-day week is the norm then it start on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday [1]. And, of course, some cultures don't use a seven-day week.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#N...

Why limit to Sat-Mon? If one has to offer such a feature, might as well go all the way and make it an arbitrary day. One standard plus one variation can be special-cased, but with two variations you might as well code things properly.

> I live in the UK and the general convention here is the the week on Monday.

Uh, no. The work week starts on Monday, but the week starts on Sunday. The link you provide supports that.

I agree with everything else you say though. It's useful to know that some people don't work Fridays but do work Sundays, or some people have other customs.

Strange. I don't ever recall Sunday being used as the start of the week in the UK. I asked a few people here and they all said Monday. The two printed calendars I was able to find (a diary and a wallplanner) all use Monday. ISO 8601 also starts the week on Monday [1].

You are correct that the Wikipedia article I cited says that in the Judeo-Christian tradition the week starts on Sunday, but that is clearly for religious purposes. Since the UK is home to people of many religions and none, I'm not sure why you think that Sunday is normative.

Serious question: does it feel different if your week starts on Sunday? Do you feel like your week is bracketed by a non-work day at each end?

[1] http://www.npl.co.uk/science-technology/time-frequency/time/...

I've tried to set up my calendars to start on Monday, over the years. It makes sense, because the two major segments of my life, the work week and the weekend, are each displayed contiguously.

And yet I get confused. Probably because I've grown up with Sunday to Saturday calendars, and almost no one else does a Monday start calendar in the US.

And while thinking about this post, I wondered, would it make sense to display calendars with both? An eight day display, showing last Sunday, this week, and the coming weekend.

To answer your serious question: only if I stop to really think about it.

Sunday in my youth was a quiet day. Shops were closed. TV was dreadful. I did chores and prepared for the coming week. Saturday was a day off for fun, Sunday was a sort of day off, but for quiet preparation.

Now Saturday and Sunday are days off for fun; tv is better; shops are open. So, it feels as if the week starts on Monday.

If it makes any difference I'm 42.

Good list, and interesting how at least half of the points are about localisation/internationalization. The date point was good I find that one very annoying. The easiest way to work it out on forums is usually to look at the previous post and see what number goes down (day).

I didn't realise the mm/dd format was only officially used in two countries. I've never understood why it's use at all, it makes much more sense going from day-month-year. Is there a reason mm/dd was chosen in the US and Belize?

As with most internationalization problems, blame the British. We used this middle-endian format around the time we colonised North America (I guess it does kind of make sense when you're reading aloud). The USA standardised on it, whereas most of the rest of the world (including Britain) moved on to a more logical format.

See also: power plugs. The British came up with a new British Standard plug seemingly every few years, and all the places we colonised use a different British Standard. We are the reason you need to spend $20 on a universal power adapter with 10 different attachments.

Indeed. Even going 50 years back, we had different plugs for different parts of the UK. I remember my grandmother plugging stuff into her light fitting as well with an adapter. I'm sure stuff caught fire a lot then.

Regarding dates, I think yyyy-mm-dd makes sense (big endian dates) as you can sort naturally.

I switched to yyyy-mm-dd for almost all my own records shortly after I learned about it when I started using Linux in 1996. Having any consistent format helps in searching, and as you pointed out this is the simplest to sort.

We also pioneered colonialisation, plundering and killing the natives. The US was a good student and has now become the master.

> Is there a reason mm/dd was chosen in the US

I don't know which came first, but it agrees with the way we say it out loud. "Today is September tenth." So, maybe that's why?

And I think in other countries, it's said the other way around, right? "Today is the tenth of September?" That would actually be okay sounding in the U.S., too, though a little uncommon. Can you say "Today is tenth September"? That sounds very weird to me.

September the Tenth, or Tenth of September.

Both read well, and when we use shorthand we use a "/" in place of the/of.

It makes more sense to order consistently by unit. So day < month < year

month > day < year seems a bit silly.

I agree it's a silly ordering. What dialect of English do you speak?

> September the Tenth

Even this sounds a little funny to my ears. In American English people say almost exclusively "September Tenth" in that order without any prepositions.

I concur. At least if the person is not saying something along the lines of

"On this date, the 10th of September, Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve..."

> In American English people say almost exclusively

As an Australian living in North America for seven years, my ears still daily pickup when the American dialect leaves out words.

Examples that come to mind: "Two hundred three", "Write me", "September tenth"

> "Two hundred three"

I'd be curious to hear you elaborate on this one. In American school, I learned that 'two hundred three' is the only acceptable version, but in casual speech people invariably say 'two hundred and three', which sounds more natural.

Which one do you say?

At least Australia and the UK correctly ( ;P ) use "two hundred and three".

There's a wealth of differences between British and American english: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Bri... (Of particular relevance here is the numbers section.)

> In American English people say almost exclusively "September Tenth" in that order without any prepositions.

Possibly regional, but I hear people say 10th of September quite often on the US West Coast. I would guess it has to do with the way we talk about the date... days in the future seem to follow the mm dd format while talking about the current date seems to follow dd of mm.

I agree, but I think d/m/y is _equally_ silly.

YMD is clearly the thinking person's choice. It's the one that naturally sorts in lexicographic order, and also naturally extends to YMDHMS.

In Dutch we say: 'ten september' (also, we don't capitalize names of the month, see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Capitalization#Capitalization...)

I usually say "Today is the 10th/tenth of September".

> And I think in other countries, it's said the other way around, right? "Today is the tenth of September?" That would actually be okay sounding in the U.S., too, though a little uncommon. Can you say "Today is tenth September"? That sounds very weird to me.

You mean in english? Because in portuguese we use cardinals to refer to days, and not ordinals. "Dez de setembro de 2012"—literally: "Ten of September of 2012." I'd guess it's the same in spanish.

I prefer year-month-day. This extends logically into time, and plays well with regular math. Except for switching base every digit.

Also, this is an ISO standard (ISO 8601).

Switching base every digit is fun. Before Britain made their currency dull, some LEO and ICT (later ICL) computers did £sd arithmetic in hardware.

Interestingly someone had the foresight to use dd/mm on the US customs and immigration forms handed out to arriving visitors. I guess then only visitors from Belize are likely to get caught out :-)

Does this practice extend to other official forms?

As long as it's ascending or descending in colloquial use, it's not a problem. The mess happens when the date is listed as mm/dd/yy.

If you're doing timestamps, it should be yy/mm/dd, because that then feeds into the continuation of the descent into hh/mm/ss

I think there should be a distinction made in this discussion between the technical use of dates for the purpose of storage, and display of dates for the end user.

Why don't we display dates as seconds since epoch? Because people don't recognize that format.

For technical purposes, use a date format with technical advantages (YYYYMMDD). For displaying the date for the user, format it so people can understand it (ex. January 10th, 2013) - and localize it if you have that information, or allow customization, or it all else fails, provide and explanation.

Why is nobody using the ISO format for dates? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 yyyy-mm-dd? Another benefit is that it sorts correctly in the file explorers (I used to name my photo folders like that...).

Coming from a country where we typically do dd/mm I can never remember what the English standard is. I've taken to always writing the name of the month to be sure.

Also, can the huge lead of the iPhone still be true? I thought Android was outselling the iPhone by now. But perhaps the low end Android buyers don't really surf?

I personally love using the ISO format as well.

As for the iPhone vs Android thing, the graph used by OP is a bit misleading (it's restricted to AUS only). I'd take a look at these ones instead: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201108-... or http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201108-20120... for worldwide.

I guess he's trying to highlight how it's different in different places around the world though.

Because it's a format rarely used outside of an engineering context. If your users are 100% from a technical background, and always will be, fine. Otherwise, a lot of your users will find it difficult to parse dates in this format.

In my country (it's small, I admit that) yyyy-mm-dd is official date standard.

According to the map of date formats in the article, there are a lot of people worldwide who use this format outside of an engineering context.

> Why is nobody using the ISO format for dates?

Sweden uses it. In informal situations you often see d/m but whenever a year is present it's always y-m-d. In fact people identify themselves using this format as part of the national ID numbers that are used for everything from healthcare to newspaper subscriptions.

In Sweden I've seen d/m-yy or d/m-yyyy used when a year is present, and I still use it when signing contracts, though I am starting to write the first letters of the month instead.

I've always interpreted that as d/m -yy, simlar to 'yy, as d/m yyyy would be the correct format.

On HumanamuH I'm using "yyyy-mm-dd" or "mm-dd hh-mm" wherever several dates are displayed in a column (e.g. chat messages or notifications). I think it's easier to see where the day or month changed and it's sorted intuitively. But...

Several people who registered from the US stumbled over the form that lets you enter your birthday in "dd-mm-yyyy" format. Even though the format is explained right behind the form field. They were probably just as irritated as the majority of the world is by "mm-dd-yyyy". Not sure if using "yyyy-mm-dd" for birthdays works better internationally.

Maybe changing the format depending on the IP address would reduce confusion. Of course, users could also have an option to localize their date formats, but I assume most wouldn't want to bother.

By the way, the article contains Wikipedia's map of "Date format by country" which answers your question why nobody is using the ISO format for dates (some do):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Map

Alternatively, go "dd/month/year", eg:

  [ 12 ] [ December |v] [ 1980 ]

(Please forgive my crappy ASCII Art month dropdown.)

Traditionally, East Asian languages and Hungarian (I don't know about Lithuania and Iran), that use the YMD format have an overall "big endian logic". We say many things backwards compared to the rest of the world. Our names are also in reverse order, for example.

That's the format I use in my custom blog engine, which parses markdown files into blog posts. As you mention, this results in blog posts that self-sort regardless of file manager, plus it's easier for me to parse. The down side is the fact that auto completion doesn't work as well on the command line (because all my blog posts start with 2012, so far).

I've been using this format everywhere I can for years now. Quite often, when first exposed to it, folks go directly from "Huh?" to "Oh wow, that makes a lot of sense."

One person at a time.

I've taken to always writing the name of the month to be sure.

Apparently the US military does this as well do avoid problems when liaising with other countries (01 JAN 1970)

Also, can the huge lead of the iPhone still be true? The author is Australian, and I'm wondering if his iphone data is national rather than international. The iphone here seems to have a bigger stranglehold than in the US, though that's merely my perception and I don't know the real numbers.

The iPhone were I currently live (Northern Ireland) seems to still have a massive grip on the market. I'm still in grammar school (high-school), and I can safely say that aside from a few Android phones and a lone Windows phone, out of ~150 people every single person in my year (17-18 y.o.) has an iPhone.

Yes, but how much of that is because a large amount of people in your age group (if they're anything like mine were) own second hand phones (whether purchased second hand or handed down from their parents). The iPhone was dominant overall around the time of the 3G/3GS, so there are a lot of second hand versions of these in the market, unlike early android ones like the G1 or HTC Hero. In fact, if NI is anything like the ROI, those early Android phones weren't even sold by the carriers. Also, they sucked. Android didn't function well until Froyo/Gingerbread (2.2/2.3) and didn't look good until ICS (4.0).

I'm only 1-2 years older than you, but I've noticed in my age group a huge swing from iPhones (or iPod Touch + dumbphone if you can't afford an iPhone or find a second hand one) to mid-range Android phones like the Galaxy Ace (which is probably the second most commonly owned phone among people I know, behind the iPhone 4) by people replacing iPhone 3Gs and 3GSes. The iPhone is still on top, but it's no longer dominant.

Also, for some reason I cannot fathom, a small group of blackberry users. Including one who traded in an iPhone 4 for one. I really don't see the appeal, but I guess some people just really like bbm + physical keyboards.

(Rough guess of the proportions among people I know is 50-55% iPhone (of which it's mostly 3GSes and 4's - the 4S is non-existent among my friends, which pretty much reinforces my theory that they're not buying new), 35-40% Android, 5% Blackberry, 5% dumbphones. I'm not aware of any WP users)

Also, can the huge lead of the iPhone still be true?

He explains in the text that this depends entirely on the target market. In some countries the iPhone utterly dominates and in others it's down in the baseline.

Qihoo’s 360 browser is not a full browser it behaves like an addon to IE. It will use the IE kernel of whatever version is installed on the users machine. So if the user still has IE6 it will render pages with the IE6 kernel. You dont really need to pay attention to it as a web developer you just need to know that if it the page displays correctly in IE6 then it should display correctly for a user Qihoo’s 360 browser that uses IE6 kernel

"if it the page displays correctly in IE6"

...erm, well damn.

Why's it so popular, compared to Firefox, Chrome, or something else?

Supposedly the browser will switch the rendering engine on you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo.

Another problem is the address format. US sites that ship internationally almost always require a state field - something that's not a part of the address here in Sweden. For sites with lots of international customers it might be better to let them format the address since there are a lot of different formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)

Also mandatory zip codes. I keep getting sites that won't let me submit a form without a zip code, even after I've deliberately chosen Ireland in the list and the page refreshed and replaced the state field with a county field. The latest case where this happened to me was creating an account on Sony's website for the Planetside 2 beta. I usually enter in na or n/a for that, but I've even had sites that attempt to validate the zip code according to US rules even after I've selected Ireland in the country box.

(For anyone wondering, post codes in Ireland don't exist outside Dublin, and even then they're a number from 1-24, which doesn't validate either)

Good post. The only question is: are these developers "uncultured" or simply focusing on potential paying customers?

We're uncultured.

We're "uncultured" to ignorant, pretentious, asses like the author of this post.

Ignorant in what sense?

Also worth reading is the link to how the 'Qihoo 360 Safe Browser' won the Internet in China:

http://www.digital-dd.com/qihoo-browser-war/

Basically, exploiting people's ignorance of the Internet, security, and, according to them, the Chinese people's deference to authority.

>(I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these).

It's not difficult to understand. If you're targeting a mainstream demographic in the US, then any domain name that isn't a .com is basically worthless. Among the non-tech-savvy, many will not even recognize "example.us" as a URL, and even the tech-savvy will sometimes forget and type "example.com", which means that you need to buy the .com as well.

So buying the .us domain in addition is basically just paying $4/year so that you don't look Americentric... in the rare case that somebody even notices.

I love the fact that Indonesians only seem to use Firefox or Chrome. The rest of the world is playing catch-up.

Not so uncultured ;)

I like this article! Internationalisation is something I'm sort of interested in, although I haven't done anything about it.

1) I know that I've lost this war, but it's a shame that the browser that your customer is using is relevant. It's a shame that people can't just code standards compliant code and it'll run fine on any standards compliant browser.

2) Using letters instead of numbers for months is good. I'd prefer ISO 8601, but I know that's going to be a long time.

3) Names are a difficult problem. There's money to be made with a decent name input, validation, fixing library.

4) Is complicated for me. Do I want people to code standards compliant stuff with graceful degradation? Or do I want people to push those using obsolete broken systems to use something better? I had hoped that the rise of netbooks, and then smart phones, and then tablets, would make coders realise that many people are using weak[1] computers and code appropriately. Unfortunately many people have a regular site (big and stupid) and a mobile site (small, stupid, and usually broken beyond usable).

8) I'd love a better fix for timezones. I'd love some kind of markup magic that means Bob can type (something like) <13:45 EST> and it gets autochanged to whatever my local timezone is. (On a tangent, I want Minecraft to buy Swatch BEATS and so people can use those for online competitions etc.)

>The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

- - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

I wonder if he still thinks saying that was a good idea.

>Firefox and Chrome command 91% of the market ... This is a perfect example of where knowing your audience is key and blanket statements made on a global scale are frequently irrelevant.

Just in case you fall into a premature delusion: If you market to Europe or Asia at all:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201108-201208-... http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-as-monthly-201108-201208-...

Asia and Europe beg to differ with their 25%+ IE ratios. Sometimes you can't "know your market". Google didn't market orkut to any region but by some freak chance of nature it became the social network in Brazil. Many times, you can't know who will use your product until they do.

Will you find buyers for your product in Asia or Europe? Considering the number of people who live there, probably.

p.s. One thing that bothers me about statcounter is that there are no absolute sample sizes specified so for all you know, the data could be based on 100 people.

While I agree that it's important to know about these considerations, I think it's equally valid to ignore them.

If I know my target audience I can properly support them. I can give them the best possible experience because I understand their needs and their assumptions. However, if I don't, then when I try and I will fail in embarrassing and sometimes infuriating ways.

I like to develop and design purposefully. I want to make something that may be available to all, but is tailored to perfection for a small group. This gives me a set of constraints and frees me from others. When I choose a locality I can ignore others and focus on the assumptions and ideal experience for that locality.

Obviously this doesn't work if you're more of a 'fishing' based company. You need to be just good enough for everyone that some group or another will bite and then you can focus on them while maintaining 'good enough' for everyone else.

The thing I'd hate to see is developers reading this article and wasting time on i18n and RTL support when they should be focusing on an exceptional experience for a user group they understand.

> 6. Country code top level domains give context

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I'm a self-proclaimed domain name pedant and this gradual decline into mainstream abuse of ccTLDs drives me mad on a daily basis.

> 6. Country code top level domains give context

And are a pain to handle.

.com

- US$ 10 ~

- Many registar to choose (remember GoDaddy).

.xx

- US$ 40 ~

- Usually only one registar available, if you don't like it you're screwed

- Usually the most hideous admin interface, sometimes only functional in IE

Just as an FYI (in case it's useful), I recently had to register 20+ country level tld variants of our .com address and after a lot of research the best outfit I found in terms of price, range of country level tlds offered, modern admin console etc. was http://www.gandi.net

Any particular ccTLDs you are referring to? None of these points align with my (European) experience.

> 6. Country code top level domains give context

However, pay attention to the fact that "top level domain" does not necessarily have anything to do with language.

For instance, .it = Italian, right?

Wrong. There are German and French language minorities here, amongst others. Other countries are even more confusing/problematic.

I hate it so much that linked in default to Malay every time I landed on its pages. No way to change it to English.

Is Linked In not honoring the Accept-Language header, or is your browser specifying Malay as Accept-Language?

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...

And there's one more: don't assume that name on credit card is written in 7-bit ASCII.

I have never heard of the 360 Secure Browser before, but I have found the link for it http://se.360.cn/. I was going to download it to see what it was all about.

Lesson 0: make the text on your blog/site darker than the current fad du jour says it should be. It's a pain to read this on the common computer display.

Fascinating data presented there, but sometimes it's hard to see through the sarcasm to the point he's trying to make.

I love the use of the .st for sites like linkli.st that end with list. And of course for the smalltalk community.

Concerning timezones, is there any viable way to get the user's timezone? Javascript only?

Most sites require manual entry of the timezone; I've seen very few that bother to detect it. Javascript seems to be a good option, though it doesn't exactly get you the timezone, just the current offset from UTC.

>just the current offset from UTC.

Never gave it a second thought, but this actually explains a lot.

DST, of course, shifts the offset by 1 hour, and I've often noticed that sites mis-detect my timezone by an hour with startling regularity.

Pretty cool list. Small nit pick though:

> In the UK, it’s all about .uk.

I very rarely see .uk domains, most at .co.uk

I'm perhaps an odd case, because I work in academia in the area of government policy on health, but on a day-in day-out basis I see .nhs.uk, .gov.uk, .ac.uk, .org.uk and the occasional .mod.uk. As the parent of two toddlers, I'm starting to look at more and more .sch.uk and in my IT work I quite often see .net.uk and .nic.uk addresses.

The new UK Government site can be found at simply http://gov.uk

And its a big pile of pants. (N.b. I note from your CV that you work on "Development of large e-government" sites, so if it's one of yours, please don't take it personally!).

The search is fairly useless, it misses large chunks of Government services such as health and the military, and for those that it does cover it doesn't either a) go into much detail beyond generic overviews or b) provide easy to find links to more specific websites. E.g. I wanted to find out what local policing initiatives were happening in my area, so I went to the crime and justice -> police section, but there was no local information or links to my local police force. At the end of the day Google and the existing array of .uk sites I cited previously did the job marvellously.

Its also something of a red herring, as even if the enormous task of delivering what it promises is somehow achieved, the vast array of government agencies (all the way down to local government) are so disparate (particularly in relation to online presence and marketing) that they will not support it and will continue to promote their own websites directly, leaving it to fade into obscurity. Even Google and other automatic algorithms won't like it, because the more pertinent, local, definitive information won't be there.

The web works best as a decentralised, federated information store. Monolithic sites like these miss the point, miss the opportunity the web brings, and almost invariably fail to live up to the goals they set themselves. The fact they are usually over budget and over time is another side of the same coin...

Agreed and most Aussie addresses I see are .com.au

Surely the set of all .co.uk domains is a proper subset of all .uk domains.

Simplifying timezones as GMT offsets completely throws away local DST rules.

calling people "uncultured" for sticking to the conventions of their country is ridiculous and invalidates the author's entire argument. He makes 1 (MAYBE 2) valid argument(s) in the entire piece and largely comes off as a pretentious ass. By his logic we shouldn't have to call this language "English" because it's not just spoken in England. The US invented the internet, if he wants to impose his warped, socialist views, he should create his own internet.

> if he wants to impose his warped, socialist views, he should create his own internet

Words have meanings, maybe you should learn them before you use them. Here's a hint, socialist isn't an insult or a dirty word.

How are his views "warped" or "socialist"? You're joking, right?

> calling people "uncultured" for sticking to the conventions of their country is ridiculous

It's the opposite of ridiculous, actually; it kind of exactly fits the definition of the word. I feel like you're going out of your way to take this personally?

Given the web is credited as being created by a Brit in Switzerland, I think we can all agree that both its origins and its intent are international in nature.

Given that uncultured in this context is about lack of awareness of cultures beyond their own, your definition seems consistent with mine.

"Honk Kong"?

> "Honk Kong"?

It's where Harpo Marx lives.

There's an eleventh one, which should probably be given number zero for being top priority: read this essay and live by it:

Lesson Zero: Don't Be A Sharecropper: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

No, thanks.

How is this at all relevant to the linked article?

+1 for shurane's explanation.

Isn't the link saying that web dev is a more free and cross compatible environment because no one organization controls it? I thought it was sort of relevant. Basically a reason to do web Dec.

By that criteria it could be posted on any web dev article. THIS one was specifically about internationalization and localization.

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