Falsehoods programmers believe about geography

http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en

by bumbledraven • 13 years ago

10 5 13 years ago

wiesmann.codiferes.net

molf• 13 years ago

Most of these observations, even though I'm sure they're true, are only mildly interesting.

The last stated falsehood, however, is notable:

> Language codes will match the country code of the country they are associated with

This is a very confused statement to begin with. Many languages are not "associated" with a country at all. Many languages are spoken in different countries, and many countries have multiple official or common languages.

This is why using flags or country codes as language indicators bothers me. Even for English it can be confusing: do you pick the US flag? The UK flag? It also means it is usually impossible to localise a website based on the TLD alone. In most cases you will also need a language code somewhere in the URL. Many web developers forget this.

Another important oversight is that not all inhabitants of a country might speak one of the official or common languages. Just ask any expat with an iTunes store account. It is much better to offer information in a language that can be chosen independently from a user's country, if possible.

Google Cache version here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

lmm• 13 years ago

Surely everyone knows the last one, given that "en" does not equal "us"?

rmc• 13 years ago

My pet peeve:

Countries have postcodes (or zipcodes).

I'm in Ireland, we don't have postcodes. Stop making it a required field on delivery addresses.

darnton• 13 years ago

Scroll down to the comments and follow the Google Maps link to the crazy Belgium/Netherlands border. How does stuff like this even happen?

snogglethorpe• 13 years ago

A lot of these are general problems that occur in many contexts, not really specific to geography.

E.g. the "multiple names" issue.

A big problem with the book site "goodreads" is that they only allow a single value for many fields. Some people entering a book will use the title exactly as it occurs on the cover, others will use an English translation of the title, others will use a transliteration. All are "correct" in some sense, but interesting in different contexts. Similarly, a single author can have different names in different contexts, sometimes keyed by language, sometimes by time, etc. But goodreads cannot handle more than one entry in any of these fields, and the result is a mess, with huge inconsistencies between works, and confusing attempts to work around the limitations, e.g. multiple "authors" that are really the same person with the name slightly changed.

A good first step to fixing this would be to simply allow multiple alternatives for most fields, followed, hopefully by some way of tagging the context in which they're interesting...

Falsehoods programmers believe about geography

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