[Usability] Consistency in the keyboard layouts: countries, languages

[Sergey Udaltsov <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

Hi all

Probably some of you looked at the Layouts tree in the Keyboard
Preferences and noticed that some layout names are derived from the
country names - and some are derived from the language names. If you
are curious very these names come from, you can look at
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/*.xml. These files do not belong to any
gnome project - but since their content is visible through the gnome
UI, I think it is ok to discuss it here.

So, here is a problem. The adjectives derived from the country names
are problematic and sometimes misleading (like "British"). So there is
idea to use nouns for the country-based layouts and adjectives for the
languages-based ones (actually, they are not adjectives - they are
just respective languages' names). Semantically, this looks like a
logical and consistent solution. But from the usability POV this is
problematic IMHO - the Layouts tree will contain a mix of nouns and
"nouns, looking like adjectives". Is this a real problem/usability
issue - or am I just complicating things more than necessary? Any
comments would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Sergey

PS The discussion basically starts here:
http://listserv.bat.ru/xkb/Message/375.html?Language=