Generally speaking, you can avoid the need for such numeric encoding by choosing an appropriate character encoding for your page. But that’s another discussion…

spell

• verb (past and past part. spelled or chiefly Brit. spelt)

(I interpret “Chiefly Brit” to mean “usage more popular in Britain than in other English speaking countries”, not “the ‘right’ form to use in Britain.)

Two thoughts though:
1) One of the things I love about English (in contrast with, say, French) is how organically it evolves. It would be a shame to limit its future growth by prescribing set spellings (and possibly therefore a set vocabulary).

2) I imagine this will happen anyway. In the same way that accents are slowly converging thanks to mass media (particularly television and film), I think that exposure to trans-Atlantic spellings (emails, blogs, news media) will feed into our instinctive drive for conformity and standardisation. I would bet this will take at least a few generations, but in the end I think spellings will settle into a common canon.

If memory serves, this happened with English as mass printing allowed words to be widely distributed. Before, I believe, most words (including names) were spelled phonetically. One doesn’t have to look too far in my family’s history to find “Beamans”.

Having said all that, I choose my spellings by my readership. I do consider English and American to be nearly separate languages in my brain, and selfishly, I’d be thrilled to not have to distinguish between the two. If we can make this happen, I’m all for it!

Of course, it makes perfect sense to have a standard written English which does away with all the inconsistencies between the UK and the US. It would certainly reduce misunderstanding and also prevent thousands of people trawling through the Help menus of whatever version of Windows they’re running in order in an effort to stop their machines automatically changing “realised” for “realized” (as mine annoyingly just did).

But on the other hand, English spelling makes no sense in the first place, which is perhaps precisely why we should keep it exactly as it is and not normalise it. There is the much-quoted fact that there are many ways to pronounce the combination “ou” (as in cough, rough, plough, through etc.) which has arisen as a consequence of the enormously diverse origins of the English language.

In modernist Britain phoneticists like George Bernard Shaw clamoured for phonetic spelling to be the norm, promoting an alphabet of 48 letters with each representing a singular sound. If they’d been successful, we’d be living in a world in which “cough” was spelled “cof”, (which ironically isn’t too different from the strange language of texting adolescents). Call me a dinosaur, but I don’t think I’d like that very much…

I think we should revel in the differences in English, bloody annoying though they are. Also, no matter how careful you were to avoid ‘taking sides’, such is the scrutiny a single solution would be under that there would be a consensus on which nation (and let’s face it, it’s either Limeys or Yanks) had emerged victorious. Language, no matter how subtle the differences, is inextricably linked to national pride.

I know the suggestion was for a sensible solution that would be of (for the most part) commercial benefit, but I happen to like the difficult nonsensical nuances of English around the world, and for me, art wins over business every time. So after all that I think the reactionary element in me has beaten the pragmatist into submission: I’d rather put up with the peculiarities of stateside spellings (and would encourage them to put up with mine). To adopt a universal standard for written English just wouldn’t be cricket. Or indeed baseball.