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Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

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Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#121

Post by stevage »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #87
stevage wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but there is definitely no better option. If I come across a site that is not in English, but I see a little flag somewhere, that is a very good indicator that that's the place I can go and change the language to English. (Happens a lot more when you're travelling in a non-English-speaking country.)

https://languageicon.org/ strikes me as a plausibly better option for the scenario you describe.

Yeah, that looks...fine...but I think it would still take me longer to find than a Russian flag or whatever.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#122

Post by culi »

psychoslave wrote: post #70

The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one official language and many languages are official language of more than one country. Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green f…

Yup. The top 7 most spoken languages in India are in the top 30 worldwide.

And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#123

Post by esperent »

bawolff wrote: post #77
troad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel obliged to point out that while flags do not represent languages perfectly, there is no good, user-facing symbolic alternative for languages. No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages. For the most common languages,…

> No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. Am i supposed to pick canada or is that "canadian french". Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. Is it the british flag? I have no idea. Flags for languages are stupid. Not to mention for all those languages that…

Just wait because all official EU sites now use the Irish flag to represent English, and it's getting more common in other websites made in Europe.

As an Irish person I can't help feeling a frisson of satisfaction.

But as a developer, this is just asking for confusion, especially since the Irish flag is already confusing enough.

I mean, we could have a beautiful white harp on a green background representing Irish culture. The Welsh got a dragon...

But no, it's a political statement from 120 years ago represented in three boring vertical stripes, just like everyone else's flag. It's identical (ok, mirrored) to the Ivory cost flag. It's the same three colors as the India flag, rotated 90 degrees, which itself is very similar to the Niger flag. And if you squint, or just don't know your flags well, it could easily be the Italian flag. It's a terrible choice to represent a language.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#124

Post by lmm »

tobr wrote: post #10

Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages.

As someone who uses websites, if you're not going to respect the browser's language setting (and most websites don't, for good reason) then please use a flag so that it's easy to find where I can switch away from your incorrectly-geodetected language setting. Flags do in fact represent languages, in that they are understood to denote languages, even if some people think they shouldn't.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#125

Post by troad »

scrollaway wrote: post #97
troad wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen. > Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?

You’re saying this on HN, where plenty of people work on software affecting tens of millions of people. You wanna leave your phone number and explain your “well I ain’t offended” strategy to the next PM who’ll ask you about their users in Taiwan? The Russian speakers in Ukraine who saw their homes demolished by those who brandish the flag you’re not offended by? Maybe I should just invite you to my country of Belgium…

I had initially posted a joke reply to this, but I'll post a serious one: I care a lot more about getting necessary services to elderly, semi-literate Russian-speaking babushkas fleeing Ukraine, by giving them an obvious indicator (on e.g. a name tag) that someone can speak to them, help them, then I care about your completely absurd, concocted 'well akshuallys'.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#126

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #101
culi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places like Wikipedia have a list of languages spelled out in the orthography most used for the written version of that language. I don't see what the problem with that is. Universally understandable to anyone who knows the written version of their language

That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?

The sites showing flags for translations usually have no more than a half dozen.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#127

Post by marc_abonce »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #101
culi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places like Wikipedia have a list of languages spelled out in the orthography most used for the written version of that language. I don't see what the problem with that is. Universally understandable to anyone who knows the written version of their language

That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?

I like how Wikipedia mitigates that problem by placing "Suggested languages" at the top (I think the top choices are inferred from either the Accept-Language HTTP header or the most common languages from the user's country) and below that there's a list of "Worldwide" languages which include the most used languages in the world, and finally the rest of the languages are grouped by continent.

There's also a search bar for filtering and it works with either the native or foreign name of the language. So, for example, typing "Finnish", "Suomi" or "Fines" (the latter is even misspelled, should be "Finés") will all filter out the right language.

Of course, there may be an edge case that's missing, but it's as close as perfect as it can get without reading the user's mind.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#128

Post by ttepasse »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #101
culi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places like Wikipedia have a list of languages spelled out in the orthography most used for the written version of that language. I don't see what the problem with that is. Universally understandable to anyone who knows the written version of their language

That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?

You can build bigger menus that a popup and sort them into usable buckets.

Take a look at tesla.com. The shitty CEO aside, the language/locale menu does it right: An understandable globe icon opens a menu, that menu is sorted by continents, countries and for those countries languages - with their name written in their local script.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#129

Post by lmm »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #105
IshKebab wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... that kind of makes sense no? What do you think it should say?

I want maps to show reality. Not who they *think* should be in control of Taiwan or Transnistria, but who actually is.

What does "actually in control" mean? When the IRA set up a checkpoint in Rosslea, should that have moved the border on the map? When there are disputes over uninhabited islands, do you want it to show whoever visited first? Obviously these are small examples, but the same issues apply to full-scale civil wars.

You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest if as soon as country A invades country B you move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#130

Post by marc_abonce »

toolslive wrote: post #26
Y_Y wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I…

So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)

Sorry for the shameless plug, but I already made a reusable React component for that in case anybody needs it for their business:

Npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-lang-selecta Source code: https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta

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