The LDP Becomes TLDP and i18n's Itself

Guylhem writes: "The Linux Documentation Project has a new domain name. You can now find the LDP on the web at www.tldp.org This name change came about due to some difficulties with the linuxdoc domain name (see linuxdocs.org, linuxdoc.com...) : in order to have clear rights to the domain name, the LDP had to relocate its primary services site. You can still reach access the LDP by pointing your browser to www.linuxdoc.org, but you will be redirected to www.tldp.org site." A few more details below.

Linuxdoc.org will be supported for compability reasons for the next 5 years. This move may come as a surprise for many LDP faithful, but the majority of the staff believed that the change was necessary to assure that the LDP would be available for the next wave of new Linux users.

The LDP will take care of this opportunity to improve internationalization - english (en.tldp.org), french (fr.tldp.org) and brasilian (br.tldp.org) content will be online soon. We intend to share as many resources (code, cvs, systems) as possible between the different localised versions. Within the next weeks, www.tldp.org will take you to the language your browser has been configured to accept as default. Feel like a closet writer? Whatever your mother tongue is, join us now!"

Comments

cool

[entheon]

not sure about others but I've noticed lots of screwy business with the old linuxdoc.org name... there have been many a time when I had to use google's cache to find an appropriate mirror cause linuxdoc.org was down. maybe things will be getting better... lets hope so.

Re:cool

[ThatComputerGuy]

Yeah, I saw the same thing, hopefully the new one won't see as much suckage.

And is that red-flashy-you-won-something banner still at linuxdoc.org? I'm not going to remove that entry from /etc/hosts just to check..

Re:D00D, w4r3z mY 14N9U4g3?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's amusing, in a South Park kind of way.

Auf English, bitter

[MarkusQ]

and i18n's Itself

What the heck does "i18n's" mean?

"ilen is"?

"ilaten is"?

"ilsn is"?

"belonging to ilsn"?

I can think of about thirty possible interpretations and none of them make sense.

On licence plates, you only have a few characters to work with. On message boards, if you are doing something illegal and want to escape simple minded pattern searches, your are trying to be cryptic. But in a headline? What is the point?

And what does this mean?

-- MarkusQ

Re:Auf English, bitter

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck does "i18n's" mean?

i18n is short for internationalization. It is abreviated as i18n because there are 18 characters between the i and the n.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[jo42]

I18n is the latest in Real Geek Speek: Internationalization. Basically you keep the first and last letter, then count the number of letters you chopped out and paste them inbetween the first and last letters. Saves typing and disk space. So, if your name was Buggerrugme, the new way would be B9e. Almost as bad as 'l330' fag speak.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[MarkusQ]

i18n is short for internationalization. It is abreviated as i18n because there are 18 characters between the i and the n.

Thanks. Now that you mention it, I've even seen that before. But I still think it's pointless obfuscation. Or should I say:

T4s. N1w t2t y1u m5n i0t, I'(2)ve e2n s2n t2t b4e. B1t I*segfault* s3l t3k it'(1)s p7s o10n.

-- MarkusQ

Re:Auf English, bitter

[Permission Denied]

Almost as bad as 'l330' fag speak.

I respectfully disagree. There's a real need to abbreviate this word and i18n seems fine with me, even if it's a little cryptic. Consider that a lot of places don't have tab completion (my MUA does it, but does yours?). If you don't know what i18n means, just type it into google and hit the feeling lucky button. First page that pops up explains it.

Outside of the i18n community, I haven't seen this style of abbreviation anywhere. If you have a better suggestion for an abbreviation, we'd be happy to hear it.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[cjpez]

Consider that a lot of places don't have tab completion (my MUA does it, but does yours?).

Which MUA would that be, by the way? Just curious.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[cjpez]

My kingdom for some mod points! Brilliant!

Although I disagree about the "pointless" bit. Typing "internationalization" every time the word comes up in an internationalization conversation can be a bit tiring.

But still, that's quite funny.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[cjpez]

Also, "i18n" has been in common usage for some time now. If you've ever installed KDE or Gnome from source you'd probably notice it too when reading the docs to figure out which packages need to be installed first.

But I'm beating a dead horse. :P

Re:Auf English, bitter

[Permission Denied]

VM under Emacs - just uses Emacs's completion stuff ("dabbrev", by default mapped it to M-/). Very nice package - if I type "internationalization" somewhere and later type "intM-/" it does the right thing. Also, VM (and its author) is very cool, but you'll have to like emacs first.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[cjpez]

Aaah, cool. Looks neat. But while I bear no particular malice towards emacs, I'm afraid that my heart belongs to vi and vi alone, so I guess I'll have to forgo the cool tab-completed-words-during-email thing. Or code it up myself, I suppose, but that would involve work. :) Thanks!

Re:Auf English, bitter

[MarkusQ]

Outside of the i18n community, I haven't seen this style of abbreviation anywhere. If you have a better suggestion for an abbreviation, we'd be happy to hear it.

I don't have an alternative abbreviation to propose; I have a deep irony to point out. The whole point of internationalization is to make things that are only accessable to speakers of one language (generally English) accessable to people who speak other languages. That this process is denoted by a cryptic polyglyph that isn't obvious to native speakers of any language and is justified by obscure referrence to one particular language (which is English!) is (quite litterally I suppose) too ironic for words.

-- MarkusQ

So, I wonder, do people who have trouble spelling occasionally write i17n or i19n? Or is it more common for them to write i18n but omit the wrong sequence of letters?

Re:Auf English, bitter

[LordNimon]

Man, I can't believe all this time I thought it was some old IBM-invented relic that just seemed to have been passed from one generation to the next, kinda like DASD as an acronym for a hard drive.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[regen]

DASD is short for Direct Access Storage Device.

Re:Auf English, bitter

[Arandir]

It makes sense to abbreviate internationalization. But it doesn't explain why we have silly abbreviations like "m4".

L18n!

[wangi]

en.tldp.org, fr.tldp.org, br.tldp.org, ... Hmm, may as well make the first one 'us' and be done with language origins!

I always thought Brasileiros stoke (Brazilian)Portuguese!