101–110 of 200 posts
Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.
The website argues that using a flag for a language may confuse or even offend users. It argues English would most appropriately be represented by the flag of England, but few people know the flag of England, so English is usually represented by the flag of the UK or the US, neither of which are appropriate because other languages are spoken in the UK and English does not originate from the US. I would argue that usi…
> less likely to confuse anyone than not using any flag This doesn't seem obvious to me. I don't think the word "English" is likely to confuse any English speaker. > anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin Are you saying this with the personal experience of being from a country that now speaks the language of its colonizer?
And to be clear, the US is excluded from this. Our cultural memory of our colonial history is an outlier—for most Americans our sense of our relationship with Britain is more that of friendly rivals than colonizer-colonized. The difference is largely because most of us are descended from the colonists (or people who arrived much later), not from the people that were there first, so the abuses that our ancestors suffered barely even register on the scale of colonial abuse.
That contrasts sharply with how the Irish or most Africans feel towards their former colonial powers. It's hard to feel positively towards a flag that represents a power that repeatedly committed genocide against your people.
But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure it is. Symbols operate by analogy, all language does. The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak". If you're living in the UK and are given the choice between Denmark and Australia, the latter is the more similar.
> The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak" Exactly. And that's the problem. There are countries where more than one language are officially spoken and differ (in the case of German enough that neither German nor Austrian German are usable, whereas German German is usable for Austrian German and vice versa) and these languages do not have their own…
Swiss German is German. It gets a German flag. Swiss French is French. It gets a French flag.
As a Brit you get used to American flags to denote English. It's just not a big deal. I mean I even use US English most of the time as I prefer the keyboard layout.
Barely any languages exist in the world without an associated country. You're looking for a problem where none exists. Romansh has like 50,000 speakers and a ton of those probably use something different on their computers anyway. But even there the clear and obvious choice is the Swiss flag.
Back in my day we all had to use ASCII, etc etc.
At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.
But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语
Agreed. Some flag, US, Chinese, I don’t care, signifies “language” in the context of software . That is an easy, universal UI pattern. I don’t see the need to upend this for some notion of offense or other type of PCness.
At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.
At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.
By all means default to the Accept-Language header, but let me change it (and remember that choice)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a person from Ireland that doesn't take well to being associated with the "Butcher's apron" as he refers to the flag of Great Britain. Ireland has its own flag and they are very proud of it. And they'll object to any suggestion that they are English. And of course England has its own flag, which is not the same as that of Great Britain. And of course quite a few countries still using English because they were…
> And of course quite a few countries still using English because they were formerly colonized/oppressed/etc. (take your pick) and might have a thing or two to say about having to deal with the British flag. What about the fact that their language would be listed as "English", therefore reminding them it originated in England? Is listing the language as "English" significantly different from listing it as " English"?…
This is the "perfect is the enemy of good" fallacy. We may not be able to find something that is not offensive to anyone in the world, but we can pick a convention that doesn't actively force hundreds of millions of people to identify themselves with colonial powers that committed genocide against their ancestors.
If this sounds hyperbolic to you, I strongly recommend reading up on the history of English treatment of the Irish over the centuries. Then follow that by learning more about African colonization. This isn't just a matter of growing thicker skin, the intergenerational trauma these people feel is very very real.