On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:29:59 -0700, David Friedland david@nohat.net wrote:
Is The -{en-us colors; en-gb colours}- of the U.S. flag are red, white and blue. going to dissuade users from editing an article any more than the following?
I think you are over-simplifying the problem, David. My point earlier was that changing from American to British English is about far more than just swapping a few words. In the example you give above, you'd actually need
The -{en-us colors; en-gb colours}- of the -{en-us U.S.; en-gb US}- flag are red, white-{en-us ,; en-gb }-and blue.
This is not a natural way of writing and would be practically impossible to read in the edit box, or on a diff page. The difference between this and templates such as the VfD shortcut is that {{Shortcut|[[WP:VFD]]}} very rarely needs to be edited. These are add-ons to articles, not part of the body of text itself. There's no need to ever learn what {{VfD header}} does, whereas if you want to edit an article you would need to understand this proposed spelling syntax.
Angela.