DonationCoder.com Forum
Main Area and Open Discussion => Living Room => Topic started by: KynloStephen66515 on January 29, 2010, 09:31 AM
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Anybody else want to be able to code HTML in BRITISH?
I'm now bored of having to mis-spell words like 'colour' <---- even as i type, my browser is telling me i have mis-spelled that
I could go on and on about it, but I'm not going to.
Just a simple rant I know, and if it seems like it should be in a different area, then please feel free to move/delete it!
Curious if there is anybody else who wants this also!
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Anybody else want to be able to code HTML in BRITISH?-Stephen66515
Not really, no - it would be messy if the standard supported both spellings. What would you expect to happen if a tag specified both "color" and "colour"? As long as it's consistent, either way is fine... but supporting both or mixing? Ugh.
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I see your thinking, I just prefer to code in my native tongue and not, what is essentially a foreign language...
I'm just glad that there are no tags that require me to type 'Aluminium'
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Just be glad you are not Japanese or something. At least the English you code in resembles your native language, somewhat.
Or if HTML was created in Japanese and not English. Then you'd really be confused by having to type "色" instead of "color".
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haha true enough, you get what I mean though when I say I'd like to code in my own language, but until that day, I shall count my blessings that HTML was not invented by someone from Japan, China or any other eastern country.
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Ruby was invented by a Japanese man, he still opted for English keywords though.
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English, or BRITISH? (Seeing as Americans have stolen the term 'English' for what should be called 'American' or at very least 'Bastardised English')
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I too used to think the early Americans just couldn't spell but instead it seems the spelling of many words wasn't formalized back then. Later when dictionaries were compiled the two countries just settled on different spellings.
I'd guess Ruby would be American English but as it happens I don't think any of its keywords have different spelling. Perhaps the std library for it does though.
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I too used to think the early Americans
-Eóin
I was more thinking of modern day American's. I get a little irritated how most (not all) choose to call their version of 'English' the original, when it clearly is not, also, how they choose to drop letters from certain words just because they cannot pronounce/will not learn how to pronounce it correctly (IE: Aluminium becoming Aluminum)
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I too used to think the early Americans
-Eóin
I was more thinking of modern day American's. I get a little irritated how most (not all) choose to call their version of 'English' the original, when it clearly is not, also, how they choose to drop letters from certain words just because they cannot pronounce/will not learn how to pronounce it correctly (IE: Aluminium becoming Aluminum)
-Stephen66515
it's interesting that many American words (and pronunciations) are the those that would have been used in England in the 17th/18th centuries - it was England that changed from e.g. Fall to Autumn. Of course it works the other way around too..
I'm not a fan of the spelling changes either, but suspect we might be totally appalled by the spelling of the future if certain spelling habits catch on (like as in txtng ur messge - although maybe predictive text will ward that one off!)
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I shall count my blessings that HTML was not invented by someone from Japan, China or any other eastern country.-Stephen66515
The WWW was invented in Switzerland, the computer was invented in Germany... so I guess you prefer talking German here?
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... their version of 'English' the original, when it clearly is not-Stephen66515
Well actually my point was that prior to formalization neither was original and hence original doesn't apply.
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the computer was invented in Germany
-Tuxman
Only if you mean calculating machines. The first 'modern' all-purpose computer was built during World War II at Bletchley Park in the UK to crack German enigma codes. It was called Colossus and was built by the British Post Office Electronics engineer Tommy Flowers.
The first genuinely theoretical computer scientist was Alan Turing (who also worked at Bletchely Park).
See:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm
and
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/BriefHistofComp.html
(see the Universal Turing Machine a little way down the page).
Back on topic ...
I can't see why it would be impossible to have synonyms in HTML so that both color and colour are equivalent. That way people who learn English can use HTML without irritation and the Americans can carry on getting it wrong!
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OK, so back to the localized languages then. Good old Office 95 supported German macros. :Thmbsup:
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I can't see why it would be impossible to have synonyms in HTML so that both color and colour are equivalent. That way people who learn English can use HTML without irritation and the Americans can carry on getting it wrong!
-Carol Haynes
(https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/5Large/TFR1E0.gif)
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The WWW was invented in Switzerland
-Tuxman
By an Englishman
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... for worldwide usage, not language-dependent. :)
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... for worldwide usage, not language-dependent. :)
-Tuxman
Well, yes... However, reality dictates that we must all be able to communicate with one another. It's one thing to have individual webpages localized, quite another to try to have the code underlying available in different languages or even dialects!
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Code is not a language you communicate in, right?
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I can't see why it would be impossible to have synonyms in HTML so that both color and colour are equivalent. That way people who learn English can use HTML without irritation and the Americans can carry on getting it wrong!-Carol Haynes
It would be horrible. The language definition would bloat up, there's the already-mentioned issues if multiple spelling variants are used in a single tag, et cetera.
OK, so back to the localized languages then. Good old Office 95 supported German macros. :Thmbsup:-Tuxman
You mean keyword in German? Ugly ugly ugly. What happens when you try to use one of those macros in a non-German locale? And what about a non-German trying to read the macro? Plain silly. Already seen the problems it causes when silly products like Borland C++ Builder output dates/etc in internationalized form, and fail to read those back in another locale... localizing an entire language is even worse.
Code is not a language you communicate in, right?-Tuxman
It sure is - identifiers and comments.
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You mean keyword in German? Ugly ugly ugly. What happens when you try to use one of those macros in a non-German locale?-f0dder
Never tried, but it was funny. ENDEWENN instead of ENDIF and such... ;D
Code is not a language you communicate in, right?-Tuxman
It sure is - identifiers and comments.
-f0dder
I didn't mean that. :D
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Anybody else want to be able to code HTML in BRITISH?
I'm now bored of having to mis-spell words like 'colour' <---- even as i type, my browser is telling me i have mis-spelled that-Stephen66515
<sarcastic ethnocentrism>
Oh but you have misspelled "color." You've got an extra "u" in there! You just need to learn how to spell English words the correct way and all your HTML problems will vanish like magic!
</sarcastic ethnocentrism>
Actually when I was in my first few years of grade school, I thought I was so smart and as a result on my spelling tests I'd add an extra "u" in words as is appropriate for British spelling. Naturally the teacher marked them wrong but when I protested she gave me full credit.
I guess I was kind of a smart aleck. (Maybe I still am...) :o
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haha, but at the end of the day, you was correct, the American language should be exactly the same as the British one...I understand that accents would change the pronunciation of some words, but this does not require a total disregard of letters in certain words (Aluminium)!
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Yep, so the Americans with their bubblegum accent should go back to British English. No-one forced them to split.
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Yep, so the Americans with their bubblegum accent should go back to British English. No-one forced them to split.
-Tuxman
tbh, i couldn't care less how they pronounce the word, or what their accent sounds like, as long as the spelling is correct!
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English is not a dead language. It is still evolving, both in the US and the UK, as well as anywhere else it is used. Local versions will exist that will vary from the original for much the same reason why there are different races of people on this planet...
They evolved that way.
Nobody on this planet currently uses the version of English that existed at the time of the American Revolution.
To prove my point, I refer to this excerpt of a British publication about the work of Benjamin Franklin, as it appeared when it was first printed, way back in 1751:
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ] (zipped pdf)
None of us spell like that any more, not in the US or the UK. We don't even seem to use the same alphabet as we did back then.
So, no more about who is spelling things right or wrong unless you have plans on ignoring over 250 years of language evolution and adopting the spellings that were in use in 1751 on BOTH sides of the ocean.
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My original argument was not that Americans spell things wrongly, but, rather to rant that I would like for both variations of the English language to be recognized by all coding facilities.
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My original argument was not that Americans spell things wrongly, but, rather to rant that I would like for both variations of the English language to be recognized by all coding facilities.
-Stephen66515
I know that but the discussion devolved into one of who is spells it right and who spells it wrong.
And it really irritates me to listen to this type of argument because it is both silly and insulting to both sides.
The truth is that either both versions of English are right or they both are wrong.
So I'd like to see an end to the insult flinging from both sides of the ocean and for us all to be a little more educated about it and realize evolution of languages does happen, and neither version is wrong.
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My original argument was not that Americans spell things wrongly, but, rather to rant that I would like for both variations of the English language to be recognized by all coding facilities.
-Stephen66515
I know that but the discussion devolved into one of who is spells it right and who spells it wrong.
-app103
As with most of my posts, we sorta went off topic lol
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... to rant that I would like for both variations of the English language to be recognized by all coding facilities.
-Stephen66515
Why stop there though, what about other languages, how about synonyms of various keywords? The truth is as Tuxman pointed out, code is simply not a language in the classical sense of spoken or written languages.
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Classmate of mine had to do a little Excel automation today, and was puzzled why he couldn't do square roots. Turned out that in Danish locale, Excel doesn't have SQRT(), but a Danish abbreviation of it. Imagine how wonderful it must be to use spreadsheets written by people in other countries?
code == english, basta.
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code == not in any natural language, basta.
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The truth is that either both versions of English are right or they both are wrong.
-app103
They may both be right, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to call both of them English.
At some stage, English will need to be defined as the language as spoken/written in England, leaving the language spoken in the US needing a different title. It's the same situation with Spanish as spoken in Spain and South America.
And that's the issue about HTML; it's actually written in American but that does make it just a tiny bit more confusing for people used to writing in English - though personally I notice myself switching between the two spellings fairly automatically depending on where I'm writing (and sometimes switching back to English if I think that using the American spelling might seem an affectation).
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They may both be right, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to call both of them English.
At some stage, English will need to be defined as the language as spoken/written in England, leaving the language spoken in the US needing a different title. It's the same situation with Spanish as spoken in Spain and South America.
-Dormouse
If you want to change the name of the spoken languages, be it English, Spanish, French (yeah there are different versions of that too) or anything else, you are going to have to go back in time and prevent the spread those languages around the world in the first place, and perhaps create a new language just for use when conquering lands and then name it what you want, for each place you invade, colonize, or whatever.
Yes, I am proposing that if you don't want your native language mutated in another land, don't bring it with you when you conquer it. The locals will adopt it, and along with those you leave behind, will change it and call it by the same name as the language you speak, because at one time it was.
Languages are named after their country of origin, not after the country they belong to, because a language can't really belong to any single country that doesn't seal off its borders and never lets anyone in or out.
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If you want to change the name of the spoken languages, be it English, Spanish, French (yeah there are different versions of that too) or anything else, you are going to have to go back in time
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Languages are named after their country of origin, not after the country they belong to, because a language can't really belong to any single country that doesn't seal off its borders and never lets anyone in or out.
-app103
This isn't really so. Languages evolve and diverge. After a while, it becomes inconvenient and impractical to call different versions by the same name and then they get different names. Languages are usually named by people who speak another language; it seems very unlikely that when this time comes for different names that English will be the name for the language in the USA and a different name will be used for the language in England. Canadian English is a bit of a mix of the two, tending more towards American English.
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Nobody on this planet currently uses the version of English that existed at the time of the American Revolution.
To prove my point, I refer to this excerpt of a British publication about the work of Benjamin Franklin, as it appeared when it was first printed, way back in 1751:
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=21533.msg194181#msg194181)) (zipped pdf)
None of us spell like that any more, not in the US or the UK.
-app103
I had a look at this and would say it is pretty much identical.
The spelling of subtil/subtle has changed.
The dipthong/ligature ae and ligatures ct & st are now usually written as separate letters, if only because that's all that's available in typefaces.
f is used as a way of writing s (depending on position in sentence).
But these are just different conventions in the way it is written, not a change in spelling or meaning, and the passage is still very easy to read as long as you are aware of the f/s convention.
There are changes in words since then, many of them simply with greater standardisation of spelling, but the biggest difficulty for most people with texts from the 19th or 18th centuries is the style of writing rather than the words or spelling.
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f is used as a way of writing s (depending on position in sentence).-Dormouse
ſ is not f.
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Well, Brazilians still speak Portuguese, even if it isn't the same version spoken in Portugal, and the name hasn't changed yet, so don't get your hopes up on the American version of English being renamed any time soon, or within your great-grandchildren's lifetime, especially when the US technically doesn't have an official language, and for very good reasons (http://www.helium.com/items/1040136-should-english-be-the-official-language-in-the-usa). Without an official language, there is nothing to rename to "American".
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As I say, it's not usually the native speakers who give the name to a language and there has to be a good enough reason for other people to start making the distinction clearly. And nothing much depends on whether there is an official language or not unless there is an attempt to exterminate variations or other languages. Certainly the name won't change any time soon, and there's a fair chance the language will develop with a much stronger Spanish flavour well before that. But if you tell someone you speak 'American', they will know what you mean - and more exactly than if you say 'English'.