Comment by Ygg2
10 hours ago
I'm talking about accessibility and localization as part of a GUI toolkit.
Take localization. Any doofus with CSV and regex can localize a binary. How do you localize dynamic things like "Hi (Sir) PJMLP, you have (0 unread messages)"?[1]
In JS I can always Intl.PluralRules. Where are my Plural rules in say C#'s Avalonia (or whatever GUI is hot in C# these days, I can't keep track)?
The issue isn't a checklist; it's a quality of availability [2]. The complexity there is essential, because languages are complex beasts, and mitigations for disability are getting better and hence more complex[2].
[1] Why is localizing this a problem? Some languages are language neutral, some have honorific speech, which changes other words, and some have different ways of counting (Hello Welsh. Nice that you have ordinals for zero, one, two, few, many, and more), some have genders, some don't, some have but don't use it in some cases, ad infinitum.
[2] There is a huge Mariana Trench in the quality of accessibility for software that offers a magnifying glass and software that offers text-to-speech.
And I am talking that was already available in 2000's.
Do I have to link to digital copies of documentation to make my point?
Sure. Show me how Windows 3.* supported Unicode, i18n (internationalisation), l10n (localisation), a11y (accessibility), with special focus on CLDR plural rules.
Which will be interesting since Unicode 1.0 came around 1991. And CLDR in 2003. And Windows 3.x came in 1990.
I'm not saying it is impossible, just highly unlikely MSFT implemented those as early in 3.x. They could have taken part in those early efforts.
If you are so keen in Windows 3.x, remember before standards each OS did its own thing, and I can gladly show you the proprietary APIs used by Windows 3.x.
I imagine you never coded for it.