Making the i18n easy
The typical path for a piece of software seems to be:
- Write it in English with no thought for other languages.
- Gather users, become popular, note demand around the world.
- Suffer while you rewrite things to deal with more than five vowels and 26 letters.
Well, perhaps by starting in Japan, Microsoft will have an easier time of it with their weblog service.
Holy crap, did I just say “Microsoft’s weblog service”? Oh, well, y’all were ready to have them enter your market, weren’t you?
”Bring it on.”
With regards to internationalization, it wouldn’t be so tricky if there were better encoding support in the languages and the editors and the protocols. Ripping all your strings into a translation file is a tedious but not difficult task.
Phil: Hey, MS can’t make me any less successful than I already am. :D
Remember, almost exactly a year ago, all the sturm und drang when AOL rolled out AOL Journals? It turned out to be a complete non-event. When was the last time you linked to a post that originated on an AOL Journals blog?
I have no foreknowledge of how MS is going to roll this out, but if it turns out to be, say, just another underexplained feature of MSN, it could very well languish in the same sort of obscurity.