I had always known about what it meant, translation etc, but not the actual meaning
https://no.lastname.nz/post/2372390
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization
The important part where this scheme came from:
According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was “S12n”, the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.[3]
So it was a technical limitation gotten corporate naming scheme.
I have to highlight the best part about this, because it’s hilarious: apparently, the first numeronym was “S12n”, the email username of Jan Scherpenhuizen, because his actual name exceeded the character limit (this was back in the 80s).
Am I having a stroke? This and all the comments seem to make zero sense.
It’s an abbreviation scheme which represents a word as its first and last letters, and a number to indicate the count of letters in the middle which are missing.
“Internationalisation” = 20 characters long, so becomes “i18n”
Kubernetes has one too, K8s
IS THAT WHY! I had wondered what the 8 was for but never looked it up.
And “a11y” is the most obscure – dare I say… inaccessible – fucking abbreviation of “accessibility”. For years I only saw them in passing and assumed both these things were like, quirkily-named Javascript frameworks or niche standards documents or something, despite knowing quite well the concepts they actually refer to.
