What is the deal with internationalisation?
summary
Argues that internationalisation is accessibility, shows standards and tools that make it practical and the costs when ignored: web content is ~52% English while users are ~26% English, Unicode and CLDR provide locale data, ICU message format handles plurals and selects, browsers expose the Intl API, and libraries like format.js integrate with React. Gives a real failure mode — German text and currency caused a product UI rewrite that takes six people two months — and insists always to let users pick their locale.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:32Meet Eli
- 2:00Where is Eli now
- 2:47Numberbased words
- 3:48What is internationalisation
- 6:55Examples of internationalisation
- 7:27What do we have to think about
- 9:07Unicode
- 10:37Directional text
- 12:38Hot tip
- 14:24Localisation
- 15:14CLDR
- 20:04Gender fields
- 21:31JavaScript
- 23:32Format
- 25:24Logistics
- 26:29Continuous localization
- 27:42Trainline
- 28:41Tickets
- 31:19Line breaks
- 32:11Summary
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