"We did not expect our users to use non-latin characters"

Michael Studman — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

I have a personal policy of poisoning the coffee of any developer in my team or in my general vicinity who utters this sentiment. I wish the tech lead(s) of a certain leading non-mainstream social networking site did too.

From their customer support department:

We are aware of the problems which you mentioned in your e-mail. However, unfortunately, we are currently not supporting non-latin characters on our website I am afraid.

This is simply because when **** was first designed, we did not expect our users to use non-latin characters. That is why there are not enough spaces in [Profile] section.

We are currently planning to translate **** into Japanese, as the first non-European language, and it hopefully will go live later this year.

Adding some level of i18n support to an application from the ground up just makes sense - even if you have no plans to localise anytime soon your customers are loathe to de-localise their names or their sentiments (ie anglicise) that they wish to store in your application.

One bag of ratsack is in the post.

full fathom five: Tag i18n

"We did not expect our users to use non-latin characters"