> A lot of people are coming to eBay from a link that someone shared or from a search engine... This whole "amortized cost savings" you get from a Single-Page App (SPA) you don't necessarily get with eBay. Or people might go to eBay and open up ten [browser] tabs... If that's ten SPAs you're opening you're not really saving that much.
> At the same time in 2012 people are coming out with React, Angular... the question was "can we just use these tools?" and the answer was "kinda no"... Initially React was considered but the things we needed right out of the gate was streaming [sending as much HTML as... available without waiting for services responding with loaded data for the specific page]... With streaming you can send out stuff to the browser and have the browser [start] showing content to user without having to wait for your slowest service. At eBay there are a lot of services... Essentially if we were to adopt React or Angular the fact that there wasn't streaming would essentially mean that we're throwing away two seconds or so... which is not acceptable.
It's time for an "en-INTL" (or similar) for international english, that is mostly "en-US", but implies a US-International keyboard and removes americanisms, like Logical Punctuation in quotes [1]. Then AI can start writing for a wider and much larger public (and can also default to regular ISO units instead of imperial baby food).
Additionally, it's kind of crazy we are not able to write any language with any keyboard, as nowadays we just don't know the idiom the person who sits behind the keyboard needs.
If you want to divide English into only two categories, I reckon US English (color, analyze, center) and International English (colour, analyse, centre) is the best divide. It’s imperfect—Canadians are mostly International but want analyze, and there are other controversial words like program/programme (US, CA and AU prefer program; GB and IN prefer programme)—but I think it’s the best divide if you want only two.
Windows distributes ISOs labelled English (en-US) and English International (en-GB) along this divide.
It’s also a valuable divide for reasons beyond language, because the USA really does have a habit of doing its own thing, even when pretty much the rest of the world has agreed on something different. Your US English locale can default to Fahrenheit, miles, pounds, Letter, and their bizarre middle-endian date format, while International English can default to Celsius, kilometres, kilograms, A4, and DD/MM/YYYY. It doesn’t sort out everything, but it gives a much better starting point. Not every non-American prefers DD/MM/YYYY, but even if they’d prefer something like DD.MM.YY or YYYY-MM-DD, DD/MM/YYYY is a whole lot better than MM/DD/YYYY.
en-DK is used for this in some cases, giving you English, but with metric units and an ISO keyboard among other things.
A dedicated one for International English, or heck, even just EU-English, would be great.
The EU websites just use en from what I can tell, but they also just use de, fr, sv, rather than specifying country (except pt-PT, which makes sense, since pt-BR is very common, but not relevant for the EU).
We should also enforce a standard where every website has to change their content to match the user’s preferred idiomatic diss, whether it be “yo momma”, “deez nuts”, “six seven”, or a series of hottentot tongue clicks recorded in Ogg Vorbiz.
From what I can tell this allows some screen readers to select specific accents. Also the browser can select the appropriate spell checker (US English vs British English).
Those two mean two very different things though, why would the author do that? Please see RFC 5646 [0], "en" means English without any further constraints, "en-US" means English as used in the United States.
Also love the Oxide and Friends podcast! What strikes me most lately about Oxide since falling into their hefty episode backlog, is their book club culture. I really appreciate the ability to get a fly on the wall experience of it, I learn a lot!
Havana
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