Writing by Peter Hilton

Articles tagged ‘data’

all articles

Use Unicode

Why the only bug you should see in text is 🐛 • 2022-10-11

Mixing kinds of text

Where embedding one kind of text in another goes bad • 2022-09-20

Modelling text as data and code

Getting your formats mixed up • 2022-09-13

Modelling text as symbols

Obscure problems when displaying symbols • 2022-09-06

Modelling text as writing

Software design problems with the simplest of four kinds of text • 2022-08-30

Modelling multitudes

Measuring, counting and naming different kinds of quantities • 2022-06-07

Use a money data type

Why your software should handle money amounts separately from other numbers • 2022-04-12

Use a currency-specific number of decimals

Why a money amount isn’t just a number • 2022-03-08

Populate country lists carefully

How to source a list of countries to use in software • 2022-02-01

Localise names with the CLDR

Using the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository’s standard translations • 2022-01-25

Internationalise data

Better software through commoditised domain modelling • 2022-01-18

CSV isn’t broken - Excel is broken

Reasons to blame Excel for comma-separated values (CSV) issues • 2022-01-04

Publish data using the CSVW standard

Use W3C’s ‘CSV on the Web’ (CSVW) standard to make data accessible • 2021-12-28

Create RFC 4180-compliant CSV files

How to solve the worst comma-separated values (CSV) problems • 2021-12-23

Why CSV survives

The enduring nature of comma-separated values (CSV) • 2021-12-21

CSV character encoding

Comma-separated values (CSV) with the wrong characters • 2021-12-14

CSV delimiter confusion

Comma-separated values (CSV) files don’t always use commas • 2021-12-07

Allow varied national telephone number formats

Why telephone numbers don’t add up • 2021-02-23

Respect people’s full names

Don’t call someone’s name ‘invalid’ • 2021-02-16

Validate email addresses to level 4

First person to say ‘regex’ loses • 2020-12-01

Allow all printable characters

First person to say ‘special characters’ loses • 2020-11-17

Numbers that aren’t numbers

‘Numbers’ that you can’t represent numerically • 2020-09-29