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 Scholarly Technology Specialist Center For Scholarly Resources, Sheridan Libraries Garrett Room, MSE Library, 3400 N. Charles St. The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 mobile: 410 245-7168 fax: 410-516-6229 Digital Hammurabi: www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding: www.jhu.edu/ice
