Presentations
Language Standards for Global Business©
Barcelona, Spain
May 29-30, 2006

Addison Phillips, Internationalization Architect, Yahoo! Inc, USA

On the Failure of Standards
This panel seeks to find out if "Humpty Dumpty can use a Blackberry", that is, whether de facto practices by users and evolving requirements driven by new technologies have outstripped software standardization efforts related to language and language usage.

The answer could be "yes", but that presupposes that there is a robust, well-understood, widely-implemented, and generally useful or interoperable set of standards. The reality is that language standards efforts in the software industry are relatively weak, poorly supported, idiosyncratically implemented, broadly ignored, and frequently irrelevant.

The text following Humpty Dumpty's quote in Through the Looking Glass goes:

"The question is, " said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty. "which is to be master-that's all."

Implementing "globalized" solutions today often requires difficult choices and commitments to proprietary solutions, since, like Humpty, we each try to make the standards mean what we want... and are forced to invent "standards" when nothing else is available.

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