Hi for all!
Thanks for your visits and testing!
Unfortunately, I have to say, the 'Flag project' as a 'Sweet child o'
mine' is failed:
Although it looks fine and makes aoo site a bit colorful, after a long
studying of using flags for languages, I have to say: it's failed. Using
flags takes the site to moorland.
.
Not bothering things, like using images as links takes away the original
aim of hypertext - using text as links -, and images are slower to
download than text, there are still inevitable difficulties.
- offering Korean language, we have two flags: North and South Korean.
Using them randomly makes no sense, using only one is very familiar for
one side and very offensive for the other. It wakes aoo site to be
target of political issues.
- similar circumstance for Tamil language. While we use the flag, we are
probably taking side in an argument, which is not about helping people
to get free and high quality software on their own, native language.
- There are flags for Asturian, Basque and Galician languages, but have
similar circumstances, like Tamil.
- Hindi is very widely used in India, so as an outsider, I simply
assigned the Indian flag to Hindi language. But after studying the case
it became clear, that it is a very wrong way to use the flag. Hindi is
not only spoken in India, so using the Indian flag is kind of negligance
for hindi speaking people in other countries. Not to mention, that there
are 21 more languages in India, spoken by tens of millions of people
each, spoken outside of India too, without any usable unique flag, so
using Indian flag for 22 languages is quite wrong and embarrassing for
both the site developer and the visitor too.
- taking languages, which are spoken in many countries is not quite
simple either. For example US English is not quite same as British or
Canadian English, so signing a US or Canadian flag for the visitor came
from that countries and supporting them with British English is more
than confusing. Using the Union Jack only for English speaking visitors
from different countries is also not a right way. And, using the real
English flag instead of the UK flag would be really misunderstandable
for a high percent of the visitors.
- so, we can assume, that there are three common cases. One to one is
very rare, when one country has one language. One to many is the case,
when a country has more than one spoken language. Switzerland, zum
beispiel. :) Many to one case is when many countries speak the same
language at least in similarly. Like English, French, Spanish,
Portugese. And the crown is for many to many, when many countries has
the same language but has different languages within a country too. Like
India.
Sum of it all, using flags is technically cannot be done perfectly.
Making many mistakes has no benefits for aoo site.
I have to agree that "flags are for countries and for nations, not for
languages".
Regards,
csaba
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