My possibly apocryphal understanding is that i18n and l10n both arose due to differences in American and British spellings of both words (z or s in the suffix). Simplifying “localization/localisation” to l10n saves more than 8 characters it saves 19.

It’s been terminology used since the 80s. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been around for a long time. It was coined by DEC.

It’s also the reason why Arabic text can be output on the screen, Ruby characters can be used and screen mirroring is usable for UIs that need RTL layouts. You really should look it up before criticising it.

It deals with things as small and as important as date formats, number seperators, punctuation marks, monetary formats, support for different calendar systems, capitalisation rules… you name it, it encompasses it.

It’s a genuine discipline. It’s used extensively in Windows, Mozilla and LibreOffice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...