From keld@dkuug.dk Sun Dec 16 19:47:23 1990
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Date: Sun, 16 Dec 90 19:47:23 +0100
From: Keld J|rn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>
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To: wg15rin@dkuug.dk
Subject: Danish comments I to Donn's questionaire
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COMMENTS ON THE RIN QUESTIONNAIRE.
By Sven Thygesen, Kommunedata I/S, Denmark

(This is the first comment by Sven on the questionaire,
another comment with more specific proposals for Donn's questionaire
is forthcoming. Keld)

Purpose.
The purpose of the questionnaire is to help making more adap-
table applications and effective software development in an
international environment.

Structure.
Before starting the inquiry it would be ideal to have a struc-
ture to fit in the questions and the answers.

What do we want to know to be better equipped for specifying
the support services in the operating system?

We want answers on the question: Who wants what where when and
how much? We do not necessarily need all the answers equally
hard.

Do we need to know the "Who"? Yes. It is not the same require-
ments from UK and France. It is not the same requirements from
a programmer and a bookkeeper.

Similar we need the answers on "What", "When" and "How much". A
list of "What"-s is appended.

The RIN-group is supposed to give the answers on "Where" and
"How". Is the support services provided by the application, the
operating system, the hardware - and how?

Examples of culture dependencies (The "What").
(Source: ISO/IEC/JTC-1 TSG1 N357)

1. Character encoding and handling.
Character repertoire (e.g. A-Z, a-z, 0-9,..)

Basic encoding technic (single byte, multi-octet, variable
byte....)

Character encoding (bit representation)

2. Collating and sorting order.

3. Case conversion (monocasing).

4. Translation of characters.

5. Character property classification.
Alphabetic characters

Numeric characters

Special characters

...

6. Hyphenation of words.

7. Date, time and calendar.
.....

Timezones
8. Currency

9. Number formatting.

10. Word representation of numbers.

11. Phone number formatting.

12. Postal address formatting.

13. Measurement systems.

14. Icons and symbols.

15. Colour usage.

16. Messages and dialogue.
Natural language.

Headings.

Error messages.

Yes/no.

....

17. Glyph, size, line size and line spacing.

18. Writing directions.
Right-to-left, top-to-bottom.

Left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

Embedded left-to-right in right-to-left text.

19. Paper sizes.
A4.

American size.

20. Documentation
Help text.

Tutorial

21. User interface.

22. Input mechanism.
More than one methods are available for entering characters.

23. Letter presentation.
Name and address (top-left in France, top-right in UK)

Date (right in France, left in UK)

24. Utilities (text editing, sorting)

25. Object names.
Spaces required to store object names and different character
sets occupy different size of spaces.

26. Function names.
Natural language words are used as function names.

27. Programming languages.
Natural language used in literals, identifiers, comments and
data.

28. Cultural tagging of data.
Tagging of culture dependent data (e.g. spell checking of
English and French text)

29. Simultaneous multicultural support.
Multi-user applications require simultaneous multi-culture
support.