Re: [Usability] country flag icons in the UI

[Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se>]

On 11/30/2010 01:27 PM, Stefan Kost wrote:
> hi,
>
> I have seen that some applications use icons of flags to indicate
> countries (e.g. the deluge torrent client uses that to indicate the
> origin or a peer). I was wondering if that is something that would be
> encouraged or discencougaraged. If encouraged those flags could become
> part of the icon theme (so that we would not need separate packages such
> as famfamfam-flag-png under ubuntu).
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-November/msg00267.html
The issue is that flags means nations, and what nation an area belongs 
to is not always in agreement between everyone.
> Some guidelines regarding pitfalls when to use them and when not might
> be helpful too. I am writing a small toy to analyse media content I was
> considering to use flag icons to indicate the content languages (per
> stream/subtitle).
To bring up an example from my own country (and the situation is very 
uncomplicated here compared to other areas of the world):
Swedish is not only spoken i Sweden, but also by some people in Finland 
as their first language. At the same time, the Sami people in the very 
north of Sweden speak Sami [1]. That would make using the Swedish flag 
for swedish a somewhat proper as an indicator for content language. 
Maybe just having it say the name of the language would be better in 
that case.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_languages
- Andreas