Locale Data Markup Language Version 1.0 Released

Ram Viswanadha writes "The Free Standards Group Open Internationalization Initiative (OpenI18N) announced the release of the locale data markup language specification (LDML), Version 1.0."

Comments

Re:Half of the work

[PhilipMatarese]

Hard coding strings is a big problem when it comes to localizing. If I write an app with a strings file containing every word to be displayed:
First, it make maintenance easier. The client sees the demo, and says "we don't call it a username, we call it a login!" or something like that. You just change any strings with username in them to have login in them instead.
Second, you can easily update the language for an International version of the app. Or you can have a directory with several language files and choose which one to use based on preference settings (I think this is pretty common).

I think problems with date/currency type things stem from programmers not using standard packages and methods to deal with these types. For example, I don't want to use a date format object, so I just print day+'/'+month+'/'+year.

I say better localization is always good.

Maybe we could use this to replace 's' with 'z' in localisation, while reading Slashdot in the US.