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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

#191

Post by eviks »

Doxin wrote: post #190
eviks wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?

I don't think such a system does or can exist. e.g. nl-NL is distinct from nl-BE which is distinct from fr-BE. Using a country flag doesn't work if a country uses multiple languages. Languages themselves don't have icons to go with them like countries do, but even if they did it wouldn't distinguish between the same language spoken in different countries, which can matter a lot for how things get localized. nl-NL use…

You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well.

(and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)

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

#192

Post by scrollaway »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #170
scrollaway wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in Brussels with a lot of Ukrainians — both fighters and refugees. I’ve made this a part of my day to day life since the full scale invasion. We until recently even shared an office with the Ukrainian Voices refugee committee, in fact. Seeing as you say you care about getting services to those people, let’s talk about putting your money where your keyboard is. Reach out via my profile and let me know how much…

That's a useless way to rebut their specific argument. Not a single reason in your post. You could talk about your experience, but you're not doing that. And the claims they made about how much they care were not extreme. "Putting their money where their keyboard is" could be accomplished with $10. Would $10 make you happy or settle anything at all?

My experience? My experience is you have a lot of people who claim to care about Ukraine, but then go on to say things such as “they should just give up the land”.

The above conversation is a good example of this. Ukrainian people are very patriotic especially now, and flags are a highly symbolic and meaningful subject. And not wanting to listen to “just don’t use a flag for languages”, which is a ridiculously simple ask, to then pretend it’s not a big deal for those who lost their homes and families?

GP has no idea what it’s like to be be in the exact case they claim to care about. So yes, I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate those who don’t listen to the simplest asks.

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

#193

Post by scrollaway »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #173
scrollaway wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use the iso code of the language itself as an abbreviation, with the name of the language in that target language next to it. The iso code is OK to use if you need a short “icon” for the language. There is a few standard icons representing “Translation” if you need iconography for the idea of a language switcher, too. EN - English FR - Français RU - Русский

Fair alternative, but would this not be much less recognizable on the page to a non-native speaker of the default language? What if you have so many locales that a menu or drop down is required? This does not seem to me like it’s a better solution, it just has different downsides.

Depends the kind of website you are looking at. But yes, my personal preference is to use the translation icon (it looks similar to the one used for Google and Apple translate apps), and next to it, the currently selected iso code. Then in the dropdown, as a list, what I mentioned above.

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

#194

Post by psychoslave »

eviks wrote: post #186
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…

Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?

No, I don’t.

I do think it might be conceptually possible and intellectually funny to come with flags that are generated from some pattern that some corpus of languages exhibit. Be it sui generis through some LLM, or relying more on scholar lexical/syntactic categorizations, or even something really more trivial like using a language-code[1] as entry.

On the other hand, with such an approach I’m afraid that chances are low that we can gain any adherence and a large recognition of the resulting flags from their speakers.

To my mind the best approaches as of today where already exposed in this thread: something best effort to propose the most likely user recognizable language and a clearly visible option to open a locale selector. If iconography seems a must have in the UI, showing something like a A/あ icon is rather usual by now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_code

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

#195

Post by Y_Y »

marc_abonce wrote: post #130
toolslive wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Maybe because people don't realize you're in on the joke and that this is a parody package.

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

#196

Post by Y_Y »

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 ;)

Joking aside, I have heard of people deliberately doing a sort of inverse version of this. For example, if you live in Barcelona then Ubuntu's installer will detect you as being in Madrid's timezones and wanted to use Spain Spanish locale. If you insist that you're in Andorra you get an equivalent timezone and the Catalan locale (which is the preference for a lot of people, despite the bizarre way of reporting time).

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

#197

Post by riffraff »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #166
riffraff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the "gulf of america" thing is Google pandering to Trump, they originally had a policy of only using the popular name in a given locale. > if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-deter...

I think they mostly started with geolocation-dependent names in the early 2010s, e.g. Kashmir and Palestine.

that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.

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

#198

Post by awiesenhofer »

pkasting wrote: post #172
josephcsible wrote: post #40

I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.

A 1.4MB binary size cost is massive. I'm a chrome developer and our threshold for what you need to explain the cost/benefit of is 16KB. To me this just isn't worth the cost.

Sorry, but a Chrome developer complaining about 1.4MB being too "massive" is just the funniest thing ever! xD

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

#199

Post by immibis »

andix wrote: post #54
Arbortheus wrote: post #3

Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?

It’s the reality of doing business all around the world. Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.

BTW the USA is now one of these "sensitive countries" where apps have to lie to legally do business. Just like Chinese users see Taiwan labeled as China, American users see (or will soon see) the Gulf of Mexico labeled as the Gulf of America.

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

#200

Post by immibis »

yieldcrv wrote: post #157

> Can you imagine if, gasp , your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror! Just playing devil’s advocate but I kind of get it If there was a separatist region you felt wasn’t legitimate or entirely delusional in both their existence and their aims, and third parties started giving them legitimacy with flags that your former neighbor made up at night, you would be like “cmon, wtf, cut that ou…

they still have a flag though. Tying the flag to the country code is controversial because you believe only countries should get country codes, but if they weren't limited to two characters, flag code TAIWAN is hopefully about as controversial as flag code RAINBOW or LASERKIWI or HARVARDSPORTSBALLTEAM.

They're all kind of silly though. If you want an image use ...

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