Flags or not? (Was: Re: Noticed in passing)

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

Στις 10-07-2006, ημέρα Δευ, και ώρα 11:17 +0100, ο/η Sergey Udaltsov
έγραψε:
> > > Flags !!!   I knew it.
> There will always be a way to allow users to indicate layouts using
> flags (as long as I maintain GNOME xkb indicator at least). It can be
> hidden, non-documented, whatever (so GNOME would not take political
> responsibility) - but I will keep that code. Most of the users have no
> political troubles with flags - while usability-wise, flags still
> remain the best way to distinguish between layouts. The code is
> actually in the core applet - the plugin just provides nice UI for
> downloading flags from sf.net and setting proper gconf flag.
> 
> > Perhaps we should look at how the plugins UI is exposed in the applet.
> To make the situation a bit better I did the following thing:
> - Removed the item from the applet popup menu
> - Created .desktop file for the plugin manager which puts it into
> AdvancedSettings
> I am open to other suggestions. All I am kindly asking is to keep (in
> the darkest UI corner, whatever) this executable accessible for the
> user.

Personally I am against flags being used to indicate the language your
keyboard is set to write.
You can easily get obscure cases, such as which flag to show to type
Spanish in the US or Latin America?
There is the issue of maintainance and creation of new flags. Some flags
are difficult to get right on 16x16 (they are single colour with a tiny
ornament in the middle). Ideally, one would use SVG flags which you
would resize to fit to 16x16. Those who like their panel to be extra big
will get a nice view of the flag.
And there is this issue with the default keyboard layout which is US
English. Currently, the GNOME i18n desktop shows the letters "USA" which
make some people inconvenient. Let alone having the US flag in the new
default GNOME desktop :) That would be fun.

>From the usability point of view, the keyboard indicator should show
what language you can write (not the main country this language is
used). Whether it is US English, British English, International English,
it is English, so it should show "EN", which is the ISO 639 language
code for the language. For other languages, "FR", "ES", "DE", "RU",
"IT", etc.

>From the usability point of view, if the user wants to figure out which
English layout it is, she can put the mouse over the "EN" and get the
full name of the layout (functionality available already).

There are cases where users have two English (or other language) layouts
enabled in the same configuration. You have the issue, *which* "EN" is
active at the moment. The way this is solved currently is by adding an
asterisk, so "USA", "USA*", "USA**", etc. This gives issues with the
width of the real estate of the applet. When you switch between layouts,
the small icons on the panel dance left and right because the width of
one of the applets changes. Also happens when you have "USA" and "GB".
Annoying. What we do? We set a fixed width.
My proposition would be to use the Unicode superscript numbers, ¹²³
instead of asterisks.
Therefore, "EN" if there is only one English active.
If there are more English layouts, "EN¹", "EN²", "EN³".

For those who want, it looks natural to translate the language codes. 

How do we change from country codes to language codes? That is actually
a bit tough. The layout codes come transparently from upstream, Xorg
(xkeyboard-config). This would add some extra work to Sergey and would
rekindle the discussion in the XKB list on whether to use country codes
or language codes. For this to work, there should be a layer (=list)
that translates keyboard layout codes to language codes.

Simos