Re: How about using national flags instead of text in debian.org?
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 10:32:43AM +0100, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> * Hyun-Gwan Seo <westporch@gmail.com> [2012-02-05 09:10:53 CET]:
> > How about using national flags?
> > I think that national flags are much more helpful and eidetic than text.
>
> Flags represent nations and not language. Having the German flag for
> the German language is mildly insulting for myself because I am from
> Austria. Also, the same issue applies for a big amount of other areas.
>
A long time ago we lost at least one good developer on precisely this issue: Herbert Xu
resigned because of Chinese/Taiwanese flag issues, if I remember correctly.
Chinese covers Hong Kong and Macao SARs, People's Republic of China, Singapore and Taiwan/Republic of China as a minimum -
- more or less in English alphabetical order - which one flag would you want?
[And that doesn't cover the Chinese diaspora in Australia/Canada/US/UK - what do you do if you're British-born Chinese?]
"Traditional" Chinese - seemingly OK for everywhere other than PRC / Simplified Chinese OK for PRC for the flag captions?
This is _EXACTLY_ why Fedora and Red Hat stopped relying on flags for language identification. Character sets are another
issue for Chinese but at least that should have been sorted out slightly by Unicode :)
> > If you don't understand my suggestion, please visit following websites.
> > http://www.red5server.org/
>
> Why should a brit click on the US flag?
>
> > http://gambas.sourceforge.net
>
> Why should an american click on the british flag?
>
> Please also read this posting, and following links from there to
> understand the issue:
>
> http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200604/indicating_language_choice_flags_text_both_neither/
>
> Thanks,
> Rhonda
> --
Rhonda, as in so many other things, is absolutely right :)
Andy Cater
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