Subject: i18n -> ixviiin
From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder (at...) jhu.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 09:15:03 EDT
X-Archived-At: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m10/0235.html

Perhaps we should get with that whole retro thing and introduce the use
of Roman numerals here ... thus giving us "ixviiin" instead of "i18n".

This solution has several advantages:

1) It is byte-optimized for words of 12 or 52 characters (for example
"localization" becomes "lxn" instead of "l10n").

2) It will work a whole lot better with those pesky search engines that
are confused by word internal digits.

3) It can be less jarring to read - for example, "five" for "freeze"
instead of "f4e".
 
4) But best of all, nothing can match the sheer joy of the hunt when
confronting a sentence like, "The evil of the evil is not evil, but the
evil of the evil is evil.", which, it turns out, is the numeroromanymic
version of, for example, "The eschewal of the excretal is not eventful,
but the espousal of the ethereal is eventual."

Just a suggestion ;i)

Dean A. Snyder