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International cultural differences

As an information provider on the World Wide Web, your readers could be anywhere in the world. Keep the use of idioms to a minimum, spare a thought for readers struggling for comprehension in a second or possibly third language and try to be aware of cultural differences; for example, dates are expressed differently in different countries. The date 1/10/94 would be interpreted as 1st of October, 1994 in Great Britain, but as January 10, 1994 in the United States. Similarly the French and Germans use a period to group digits in numbers and a comma as the decimal separator, whereas the Anglo-Saxon countries do the opposite, that is 1,000 could mean one, to three decimal places, or one thousand. This subject is covered quite comprehensively in The Economist Style Guide[8].

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.