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hi i'm a software engineer and i worked in the web for a good 8 years before i ever realized what the abbreviations i18n and l10n (internationalization and localization) stood for

literally i knew what they were *about*, but thought the numbers had something to do with some funky standards body or some shit

numeronyms of this form are bad so so so so bad don't
just
don't

josemanuel @josemanuel

@tcql So something is bad because you didn't have the curiosity or the inclination to ever look up what it meant?

Or is it that the shorter version's meaning is not immediately obvious? Because, by that logic, you must think compression is evil, too.

· Web · 0 · 0

@josemanuel compression is not meant to be human readable. obscure abbreviations that aren't even obviously recognizable as abbreviations are bad, especially when used in situations like a11y (accessibility), which is especially laughable because it's not accessible at all, and they *are* meant to be seen by humans

this is not a matter of curiosity to look it up, it's intentional obfuscation of something that does not need to obfuscated

@tcql So what you're saying is that, if you worked in internationalisation or localisation, you'd rather write the words in full every time instead of abbreviating them to something everyone in the field would understand or easily look up?

Also, have you noticed that these particular abbreviations make sense for different spellings of the word in English and in several other languages? You can't deny that they're ingenious.