Disclaimer: This post is NOT anti-American or an ‘us and them’ debate of any sort. It’s just a question regarding differences of English.
I have been told previously that most of the English speakers in the world outside the USA speak English closer to the Commonwealth version, as do people in Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the Caribbean.
I’m sure if we added all these folk up, (assuming that it is true they speak Commonwealth not American English), then surely there are more of ‘us’ than in the USA? (See differences between American and Commonwealth English).
Why is it then, that amongst all of this talk of i18n (Internationalisation), that it seems no-one has questioned why (X)HTML doesn’t allow for us to use both varieties of English spelling when it comes to common HTML or CSS tags? An example is color / colour (check out this heated debate), grey versus gray and the great one, center versus centre.
I’ve been writing HTML for 12 years now, and I still manage to write it ‘properly’ half the time, and have to ‘fix it’. I’m sure much of the world faces the same problem.
Funny thing is, Tim Berners Lee, man who ‘created the web’, was educated at Oxford University, UK and was working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland when his program “WorldWideWeb” was first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
It’d be fairly simple to add both versions of English into the HTML Specs, wouldn’t it? Maybe I am just naïve.
Google results show that the web is certainly skewed towards our US buddies, with result totals such as;
6,190,000,000 for center, and only 1,270,000,000 for centre.
1,290,000,000 for color, and 199,000,000 for colour.
284,000,000 for gray, and a slightly less 195,000,000 for grey.
…But it isn’t too much to ask that we could use either flavour of english, is it W3C?
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Entrepreneur, 
23 March 2006 at 9:41 pm
Interesting suggestion, but where does it end? Wouldn’t you also need gris/grau/grigio not to mention the hundreds of double-byte Asian translations of the world ‘grey’?
I, for one, would rather have a global standard that is *wrong* than have no standard whatsoever. Imagine how difficult writing an ISO-standard SQL interpreter would be if you had to recognize SELECT or PRESCELTO or CHOICI or any of the thousands of ways to say ‘select’ around the world.
24 March 2006 at 12:46 am
I’ve had that issue many times… and i know exactly what you mean. I think for me I just think of it as code/markup and divorce myself from it as “language” per se.
Although I am hoping nothing ever comes down to a “google-off” to decide which is right 🙂
24 March 2006 at 2:41 am
It’s about time someone brought this up – lets use international english, not its poor cousin, yankee english.
24 March 2006 at 12:42 pm
I wholeheartedly agree!
Just keep in mind that while Canada does use Commonwealth English, we are also part of North America, so don’t paint all of us North Americans with the same brush!
24 March 2006 at 12:55 pm
Joetek – good point, I have revised accordingly. Apologies!
25 March 2006 at 2:35 pm
I propose an apache mod that parses our Australian css and outputs the US equivalent to the browser. I will name it mod_WhereTheBloodyHellIsMyStyleSheet
problem solved, thank you for listening.
9 April 2006 at 7:39 pm
The solution is to not think of it as English. It’s just syntax after all. Once you have programmed in more than one language, switching syntax becomes second nature. I’m told the same is true of non-monolingualists (although unfortunately I can’t speak from experience).
It reminds me of my University days. When in a mathematics lecture, the square root of minus one was ‘i’. When in an electronic engineering lecture, the same irrational number was ‘j’ (as ‘i’ was always used for electrical current). It’s just the way it was (is) and you get used to it.
If you are still hung up on centre vs center/colour vs color, it just means you aren’t coding enough in Java, PERL and Python.
As for the content you see in the rendered page – now that’s a different story. It had better be the Queen’s English because bad grammar makes me sic.
11 April 2006 at 8:29 pm
Use SPIP rather than HTML
and you will use FRENCH ! not english, not american 🙂