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Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

geyer.dev

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

#91

Post by scrollaway »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #39
scrollaway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favourite newly discovered YouTubers, K Klein, talks a lot about language. What sold me to subscribe to his channel is this absolutely wonderful bit with flags at 4:30: https://youtu.be/iQNdkdqoIdw?t=4m29s Flags aren’t languages. Listen to your elders.

Short of web standardization, how should a language picker be designed for a website where presumably the main design goal is a non-default-language speaking user can pick out their language?

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

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

#92

Post by slater »

torstenvl wrote: post #69
slater wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say people from countries with multiple languages. E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English. Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.

Are you claiming French- or German-speaking Swiss users don't know that they speak French or German? Or are you claiming that they don't know what the French or German flags look like?

Come on. I'm saying people in general don't want to be associated with a flag that's not of their country.

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

#94

Post by mikedelfino »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #36
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.

I develop a language learning tool that uses flags for languages extensively. I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one. For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficul…

I checked the website and, at least at the combo box on the landing page, it already has the language name! I guess that you could just go without the flag there, and it'd still work. I'm curious though, what flag would you use for English? Would it depend on whether you spell gray or grey? Duolingo uses the United States of America flag, so there's that.

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

#95

Post by bawolff »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #45
bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly. Then of course the multitude of languages spoken in many european languages such as Spain (catalan, gallician, basque). Or the latin american variation. Or what about Switzerland who dont have their own language (they speak french, german, italian and romanch). Even your example of Swed…

Give me one example of a website that supports, let's say, three of the 20+ Indian languages, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Swiss French, Swiss German, Swiss Italian, and Romansh. You will have a hard time, even on Wikipedia. For most people, flags absolutely are the best shorthand for the language of the same name.

Here is the list of wikipedia languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix

Not to mention the software is translated into more (you can go to preferences to see the full list), wikipedia just makes the practical decision that there is no point having british, american and canadian english as separate projects, but you can chose any of them for the software interface (interestingly there are separate wikipedia projects for https://sco.wikipedia.org https://jam.wikipedia.org and https://ang.wikipedia.org)

Wikipedia has more languages then there are countries.

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

#96

Post by riffraff »

andix wrote: post #60
int_19h wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just refuse to commit. E.g. Google Maps, to this day, will not show the country for any Crimean city when you click on it to bring up its info panel. If you do this with e.g. Kherson, you get "Kherson, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine". But if you do it with Sevastopol, you only get the city name, not the region & country. It also shows dotted borders between Crimea and both Russia and Ukraine.

Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway? Crimea is a different story, as many countries recognize it to be in some kind of limbo and treat it as neither Russian nor Ukrainian. I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis. Google maps added the „gulf of America“…

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...

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

#97

Post by scrollaway »

troad wrote: post #80
bawolff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 (four languages, not one of them being “the Belgian one”) for you to see what people here routinely think of those who can’t imagine the simple differences :)

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

#98

Post by Alex-Programs »

slater wrote: post #44
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages Says who? Probably not the actual users of websites, I'd wager.

Say people from countries with multiple languages. E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English. Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.

There are very few countries with multiple equally-influential languages that don't have better alternatives for flags.

It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags.

Countries may have ambiguous languages, but _languages very rarely have ambiguous countries_. Sure, there are Finnish speakers in Sweden, but the Swedish flag remains a clear indicator of the Swedish language.

Hindi and India is the main exception to this. Arabic is also difficult, though Egypt seems to have a slight edge by convention.

> UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades

I sympathise, and if they have any better ideas than a textual list that users need to read through rather than quickly scan (not very good UX...), I'd love to hear them. From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?

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

#99

Post by bawolff »

Flag emoijis are a political nightmare.

Who is a country? Who is an autonomous region?

Which flag to use for disputed countries (e.g. do you use the taliban flag for afghanistan despite how much the western world doesn't like it).

Not to mention people might not like the flag changing in their own messages after a take over. Imagine if russia wins the war in ukraine and all the patriotic ukrainians suddenly have the ukrainian flag in their old writings replaced with russian ones after a software update. Feels like something out of 1984.

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

#100

Post by bawolff »

troad wrote: post #80
bawolff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

> As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen.

As an australian, when was the last time the Australian flag was the incorrect choice for you? I'm going to guess never.

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