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 choices and has the Spanish flag. Spanish is talked in a lot of countries including Spain, but also Spain has 4 different official languages in its own state territory. So, there exists es_ES, es_MX, es_PE but also es_ES and ca_ES. What flag should we paint in each case?
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't a universally accepted icon for any language.
A good solution: for each language option, include both the exonym (name of the language in the user's currently selected language) and the endonym (name of the language in that particular language). Make sure the search feature can fuzzy match either field.
And yes, do not include any icons whatsoever. Text only. A standard for visual depiction of languages is not going to come any time soon, and flags are completely unsuitable for the purpose.
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.
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.
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.
This is something I really hate in KDE- you choose date/time formats with a dropdown of flags, and it doesn't even give you a preview of the short format, so you have to cycle through hundreds of options and click-click-click each to find what you want, when all that's needed is [Language] + [yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM]* (or whatever) format string.
there are far fewer format options than countries, so this is an exercise in frustration
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 out in the end. I don't think we should shy away from this kind of confrontation.
> 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?!
I'm also amazed that the Github profile of the OP was not newly created just for this purpose. Instead he looks like a legit developer... just obv a hardcore nationalist ...
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!
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.
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.
Imagine wasting time on cloning the repo, making a change, pushing it, creating a PR, all that time wasted because of hate. He could use that time to fix one of the 38 issues reported by other users...
Disagreement is not hate. I do not agree with the person who wants to get rid of the Taiwanese flag since as far as I'm concerned Taiwan is a country but I do not hate him for his request.
Please don't use the word hate for these purposes as all that does is downplay cases of real hate.
If you are taking a slice of your free time just to go through this whole process to create a PR, and you know you will never get that time back, and your only message is: Taiwan is not a country, then either you are a troll or hate-fueled person. There is no middle ground, just read this part of their comment:
> TaiWan is not a country, is essentially a province of China. currently it's a district because of some history reasons.
> So, TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags, It's a big misleading to website visitors.
Country flags are inherently political. They are a symbol of a political entity. If you don't want politics in "git" (or in code in general), then don't put it in.
That said, this particular issue should not have been turned into a state-politics issue. The element in question seems to be a language selection rather than a country selection, so the very first argument ("TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags") is a bad one regardless of how you think of Taiwan's political status.
I also agree with another commenter that said the maintainer dealt with this really well. Kudos to them!
Not really. I mean, this obviously depends on what you consider political, but as the maintainer correctly noted a flag doesn't have to represent a country. I can have my own flag. Depending on my prominence, my flag can be showcased in Wikipedia and you can even include it into your CSS library. People may even recognize it. If it makes me a "political entity" is an open question, however.
But filing tickets demanding to remove something from a CSS library because it "isn't a real country" definitely is a political statement. Which, for me, is always very unwelcome, but quite mundane at this point.
I was annoyed when composer (PHP package manager) output, along with a lot of other stuff got clogged by colorful "Stand with Ukraine" messages (which, ironically, turns out to be orange in my terminal, instead of yellow). Now all this seems pretty mundane, though. Software is written by humans, after all, so all worst human behaviors will be projected onto it as well.
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.
China regularly uses the Great Cannon (the offensive DDoS capabilities of the Great Firewall) against GitHub because it hosts free VPN software mainland Chinese can use to work around censorship. So whether they want it or not, they are involved already.
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.
Taiwan is indeed not a country under international law, this was approved by ~everyone including the US. Not long ago we had a very interesting post here with a transcript of the famous Mao/Kissinger meeting. But, yes the flags are just visual indicators, they do not confirm that something is or isn't a country.
Imagine putting the Russian flag for the Ukrainian language for an idea of how Chinese people feel about Taiwan being a country.
Whilst I understand you didn't mean to start a political debate, you have made a political choice by using the Taiwan so it's unfair to blame others for "bringing politics into it" just because you don't have understanding on the subject.
> "No one can deny that it [Taiwan] owns a flag."
1 Billion Chinese people would like a word with you.
> Imagine putting the Russian flag for the Ukrainian language for an idea of how Chinese people feel about this topic.
Or rather, how Ukraine's would feel, doesn't it make more sense that way around?
> You've made a political choice by using the Taiwan flag in the first place so don't blame others for "bringing politics into it" just because you don't have understanding on the subject.
There's a country called Taiwan, it has a flag, it's flag was put next to the name of the country. Where's the politics?
I’m a dual citizen of Canada and the US. But I also know that if there’s a language selector, and I see the British flag, I know it’s gonna get me English.
Perfection is impossible when human beings are involved.
A better example would be having the confederate flag. Except that the confederacy being dissolved is already a decided issue at the national level. (Also most Americans are only familiar with the confederate army flag, and not the confederate national flag.)
China and Taiwan have no such agreement. Taiwan says one thing, mainland China says the opposite. There is no resolution.
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 choices and has the Spanish flag. Spanish is talked in a lot of countries including Spain, but also Spain has 4 different official languages in its own state territory. So, there exists es_ES, es_MX, es_PE but also es_ES and ca_ES. What flag should we paint in each case?
I've seen this mistake soo many times...