Re: Style guide feedback

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 11:32:44PM -0500, Trevor Curtis wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 02:29:19PM -0600, Joakim Ziegler offered:
> > It's worth noting that compound words like these usually shed the space
> > and the hyphen over time. It's what happened to email, and it's a common
> > linguistic development. So it seems to me that while Darin remembers
> > "menu bar" from back when there were no menu bars on any other
> > computers, "menubar" is probably a lot more acceptable now.
> 
> This whole thread is making me think of another thread we had some
> months back. It was in regards to a jfleck email about using editors(the
> people, not vim/emacs/ed/joe) and having a formal structure to the editing
> process. I brought up a question that I don't recall ever got answered.
> 
> In many cases, the docs are written up in english and then translated
> which is cool. But what about all the the different *forms* of english?
> How do we deal with this? For example, spelling of words like
> flavor/flavour, colour/color ... etc. Not only do we have to work with
> different languages, but also different subtleties in the english
> language? (US, UK, AU, CA, etc... spellings)

The style guide says that we should write using US English and gives a
number of US books as references to use when in doubt. For the other
regions of the world, we then need to make translations to en_AU, en_CA,
en_UK, etc, just like we have to for all the other languages.  There are
also some prescribed fallbacks in glibc in case not every locale is
translated (plus the good old "use the C locale if all else fails").
Having said that, I'm not convinced that all those fallback paths are
correct, but it wouldn't be glibc if there wasn't _some_ whackiness
involved.

Of course, it's trickier than just making translations (at least for
Australian English): over the last thirty years or so, the various
governments and education departments have flip-flopped between whether
to approve of "color" or "colour" in schools (it's changed at least
three times since I've been alive). So two Australian
writers/translators may not come up with the same spellings. What a win!
:(

> So in laymen's terms, how should we look at these menu
> bar/menu-bar/menubar, color/colour debates?

No! Please, let's just decide that there's no unique correct answer and
get on with writing the documentation. We've had these discussions
numerous times before. What makes people think that this time we will
all suddenly start agreeing? (Sorry; I find this really frustrating and
futile.)

> I'm starting to think that it would be best to write up all our docs in
> Latin and then provide an online Latin->English dictionary. 

Which is why I think these debates are often so pointless ... English
evolved, it was not designed and it is not even internally consistent
amongst even educated speakers within the same country. So we need to
just make a decision and be consistent within our own documents, as
others have said.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.