Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country • Hacker News Board

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#41

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

sfmike wrote: post #11

Great response that flags correlate to regions too and not 1:1 country usage, so this would be an exception to the standard. Also that the iso standard is that for zh_tw, so using that standard is within spec. Also the comment that no flag is visually not aligned with other lines having flags. All logical and rational reasons not to omit unrelated to politics.

There are also plenty of non-country entities that have flags. I live in Buffalo, New York, USA. There's a flag for the USA, a flag for the state of New York, and even the city has its own flag[1]. So even if we accept that Taiwan isn't a country there's no reason an island can't have a flag!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Buffalo,_New_York

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#42

Post by matthewfelgate » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

uranusjr wrote: post #39

sfmike wrote: post #11

Great response that flags correlate to regions too and not 1:1 country usage, so this would be an exception to the standard. Also that the iso standard is that for zh_tw, so using that standard is within spec. Also the comment that no flag is visually not aligned with other lines having flags. All logical and rational reasons not to omit unrelated to politics.

Code zh-tw means the Chinese variant used in Taiwan. The technically correct code for Traditional Chinese is zh-hant. It’s an entirely separate issue from the flag, but the developer technically should label the languages “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)” in the dropdown instead, to better correspond to the flags.

No. The dropdowns reflect Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages, not countries.

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#43

Post by matthewfelgate » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

ghusto wrote: post #22

flir wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything's politics, as this shows. You can't avoid it.

I don't agree. If I create a repo where a country list and their corresponding flags are needed for the application, I'll grab that from somewhere (maybe Wikipedia, or another repo?). If someone else comes in and says "hey that's not a country", that's where the politics is, not in my need for a country list.

Where are you getting your list of countries from?

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#44

Post by stby » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

_nalply wrote: post #30

jfernandezr wrote: post #28

Not talking about politics, here, but a flag usually denotes a country or region, not a language. You should use a flag when you're referring to a country or region, for example when you have an e-commerce website and are just distributing in certain areas. But languages do not have flags associated and then should not be used in language selectors. Check that the example in the GH thread has Spanish as one of their…

I agree. As a Swiss speaking German I find to see the flag of Germany a bit jarring, especially Germans tend act as if the language belongs to Germany. So just use the language code for languages?

It's just a service for the Swiss to warn them about the occasional use of "ß".

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#45

Post by stby » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

WhatDFHere wrote: post #2

It's sad when politics enters the community in git. Ugh.

As someone who has worked a lot with geo data and delivered them to end users, this here is just the tip of the iceberg.

Languages are already quite political, but maps and all their borders and city names are much worse. Some borders are disputed and both sides have made the distribution of maps with the "wrong" borders illegal, the Catalans hate to see the Spanish names of their towns used in the Spanish version of the website, sometimes borders are moving fast and the inhabitants of newly founded countries usually feel really strong about the correct representation on every single map in the world, and even if you use maps without borders or labels at all, it could be illegal to plot some kind of harmless data on it, like wind speeds that have not been published by the country's authorities.

Stuff like this inevitably floods the inboxes of a lot of companies, so I'm not surprised at all to see it happen on GitHub.

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#46

Post by rodface » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC

_nalply wrote: post #30

jfernandezr wrote: post #28

Not talking about politics, here, but a flag usually denotes a country or region, not a language. You should use a flag when you're referring to a country or region, for example when you have an e-commerce website and are just distributing in certain areas. But languages do not have flags associated and then should not be used in language selectors. Check that the example in the GH thread has Spanish as one of their…

I agree. As a Swiss speaking German I find to see the flag of Germany a bit jarring, especially Germans tend act as if the language belongs to Germany. So just use the language code for languages?

> use the language code for languages

This is the practice that I followed when I needed to add a regional-language pack for one of our SCCM packages. I put a "DEU" in the icon, not a German flag.

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#47

Post by mcphage » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:18 PM UTC

gattis wrote: post #15

Well, politicking is mostly a waste of time, but here we have a rare chance to dialog with someone brainwashed by a truly corrupt and malignant ruling party with absolute power, and show them what free-thinking is all about. Personally, I would have taken the shot. The whole point of opening up to trade with China was the hope that the exposure would have influence on their people and that democratic ideas would win…

> The whole point of opening up to trade with China was the hope that the exposure would have influence on their people and that democratic ideas would win out in the end.

That was one of the many really terrible ideas that we've had. In the US we say "It's the Economy, Stupid" to represent the idea that, when the economy is doing well, people are happy with the government. And then we helped give China decades of incredible economic growth, but somehow expected that the result would be Chinese citizens being unhappy with their government?!

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#48

Post by _nalply » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

stby wrote: post #44

_nalply wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. As a Swiss speaking German I find to see the flag of Germany a bit jarring, especially Germans tend act as if the language belongs to Germany. So just use the language code for languages?

It's just a service for the Swiss to warn them about the occasional use of "ß".

Huch?

The Swiss don't care. Really. My son sees the sharp s everyday in school and nobody has explained to him what it is and nobody is asking him to replicate that letter.

No need to warn the Swiss.

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#49

Post by 112233 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

greazy wrote: post #34

jfernandezr wrote: post #28

Not talking about politics, here, but a flag usually denotes a country or region, not a language. You should use a flag when you're referring to a country or region, for example when you have an e-commerce website and are just distributing in certain areas. But languages do not have flags associated and then should not be used in language selectors. Check that the example in the GH thread has Spanish as one of their…

So what should be used as the icon for languages? I accidently changed languages in my phone to Arabic on android. It uses no icons to display languages, when a language is chosen all the options changed to the localized Arabic names. I think the only logical solution is to display the options in the language, eh Arabic in Arabic letters, English in English letters etc. But icons would still be useful. But there isn'…

> So what should be used as the icon for languages?

For each language, show name of language in that language + name of language in currently selected language.

Languages are hard.

Re: Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country

#50

Post by uranusjr » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC

matthewfelgate wrote: post #42

uranusjr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code zh-tw means the Chinese variant used in Taiwan. The technically correct code for Traditional Chinese is zh-hant. It’s an entirely separate issue from the flag, but the developer technically should label the languages “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)” in the dropdown instead, to better correspond to the flags.

No. The dropdowns reflect Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages, not countries.

It depends on how you view it. If you want to show flags, use the region to annotate the language. If you want to show the script variant (Traditional vs Simplified), don’t use flags. I don’t see how you can naively come to the conclusion only one of these is acceptable.