Re: [Usability] country flag icons in the UI

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

On 30.11.2010 16:47, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> 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

I was only thinking of the cases like de, de_AT and other where
different flags would still apply. Btw. We also have Sami in north of
finnland where I am living nowadays. Thanks for the example.

Stefan