Re: Flags or not? (Was: Re: Noticed in passing)

["Sergey Udaltsov" <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

Hello Simos

> Personally I am against flags being used to indicate the language your
> keyboard is set to write.
I thouht it was already discussed. GNOME does not officially support
flags and has no stardard functionality of that kind - so you do not
have to convince me. But the amount of people who want this function
is too large to remove non-official support.

> You can easily get obscure cases, such as which flag to show to type
> Spanish in the US or Latin America?
I know there are situations where flags are not suitable for this
purpose. But there are (may be even more?) situations where flags are
just fine.

> There is the issue of maintainance and creation of new flags. Some flags
Not our business indeed. I am using large SVG flags collection from
sourceforge.net. Again, GNOME is not involved, no political issues.

> And there is this issue with the default keyboard layout which is US
> English. Currently, the GNOME i18n desktop shows the letters "USA" which
> make some people inconvenient. Let alone having the US flag in the new
> default GNOME desktop :) That would be fun.
Again, there is no way default gnome desktop would use flags. I do not
even mention the fact that layout indicator is not on the panel by
default (and it should not be, unless number of layouts is >1).

> >From the usability point of view, the keyboard indicator should show
> what language you can write (not the main country this language is
> used). Whether it is US English, British English, International English,
> it is English, so it should show "EN", which is the ISO 639 language
> code for the language. For other languages, "FR", "ES", "DE", "RU",
> "IT", etc.
Well, there are different situations. For example, switching from US
to UK layout it would be easier to distinguish by the country name
than using EN1 and EN2.

> width of the real estate of the applet. When you switch between layouts,
> the small icons on the panel dance left and right because the width of
...
> Annoying. What we do? We set a fixed width.
Of course. Even if we adopt two-letter code, we won't adopt fixed
font. So the actual width of the string cannot be guaranteed eather
way.

> My proposition would be to use the Unicode superscript numbers, ¹²³
> instead of asterisks.
Good idea! I will think of it. Actually I even like it more than
current aproach.

> or language codes. For this to work, there should be a layer (=list)
> that translates keyboard layout codes to language codes.
There is a plot to provide extra meta-information in base.xml file
(like list of languages for each layout, list of compatible models for
each model etc). And last libxklavier API redesign was started in
order to facilitate this future change. But I cannot make any promises
about the timeline - I am doing it in my spare time which is getting
more and more scarce. Any company willing to pay for this?;)

Thanks indeed for sharing your thoughts, Simos.

Sergey