I tend to agree with many of your comments on your survey and would just like to pick some of the points I disagree with:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
- who can be bothered to search for his country and language
(several times) in strictly-alphabetical lists of every single country and language in the world
Well, one the one hand I am quite happy to have a list where it doesn't say "United States", "United Kingdom" at the top, then two dashes, and then all the "less important countries".
What I agree, though, is that this could have been made more language-specific, if there had been more preparation time. E.g., if someone chooses the German version of the survey, Germany, Austria and Switzerland could have been at the top etc.
- who knows the 2-character ISO code for the languages he knows,
even when they're not obvious (e.g. DE for German)
See, I think you should choose an example you know about next time ;-) All German URLs end in .de, the German Wikipedia says "de.wikipedia.org" etc.etc. "DE" for German might not be obvious to a English-speaker, but it is obvious to a German speaker and that's the whole point of it.
- who knows the 3-character ISO code for the currency he uses
Come on, every bank statement of yours will tell you the ISO code of the currency your account is in, you will probably find it on every magazine that you read and so on and so on. Please don't tell me that this is such an academic thing...
But these are minor points, again, I agree with the general direction of your argument.
Michael