Re: [Fwd: Re: Your final comments on gswitchit in 2.4...]

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tis 2003-06-24 klockan 10.58 skrev Sergey V. Oudaltsov:
> > 3. The most obvious thing in that window is a frame, titled "United
> > Kingdom", with a UK flag in the middle, and a checkbox marked "secondary". I
> > don't knew what these do, but:
> >    - If I click on the checkbox to set it, it unsets itself again. 
> Yes. Because at least on layout should be primary.:)
> >    - If I click on the flag then I can choose another country's flag
> > instead. I would be forgiven for expecting this to switch me to a different
> > keyboard layout.
> :)) Well, this is really interesting - never expected anyone to get 
> confused. No, this is only pixmap chooser - you can set any pixmap you 
> like (for example, some people just like the texts "ru" and "us" on 
> white background - so they can choose it).

The flags are an interesting issue. In general, I think we want to avoid
showing flags in the GNOME UI for localization issues, at least by
default. Flags are often politically and historically loaded stuff and
can be offensive in some cases. Some countries share keyboard layouts
for purely historical reasons, but that doesn't mean that current users
will always be happy having that other countrys' flag(tm) plastered over
their desktop, or visible at all on their desktop.

I suspect this might be a reason why some users reportedly asked to have
a way of changing the symbol. Not that they necessarily wanted to tweak
their desktop in every little detail, but perhaps rather that the
default flag symbol turned out to be somewhat inappropriate or
offensive. A text description ("uk", "us", "de", "th" etc.) is probably
much less obtrusive and less politically loaded.

As Sergey already pointed out, text descriptions are also what Windows
uses, probably at least partially for this reason. On the other hand,
MacOS IIRC shows flag symbols, but I think we can agree that not showing
flags is the safer choice for l10n reasons.

So I'd suggest showing text descriptions by default, and only have flag
symbols as an alternative. Customizing flag symbols is probably overkill
in any case, and I suggest that feature not to be shown in the UI or
even removed completely. This is of course my opinion only.


Christian