5 ms·

(Off-topic, but if anyone from PureBasic.fr's web team is here, please please please don't use country's flags to represent languages, just put the language nam

(Off-topic, but if anyone from PureBasic.fr's web team is here, please please please don't use country's flags to represent languages, just put the language name instead - if you want a visually distinctive but recognizable icon then use a wireframe globe icon)

jeroenhd 5y ago
I don't really see the problem for this website, the languages supported are all European, named after the country they're originally from, (with perhaps US English as the odd one out). Things might start getting confusing in countries like India, of course, but I don't see the problem in this specific case. I do have a problem with their homepage related to languages though: you can't get from English to Spanish or Italian on mobile without going through some weird state machine of what language makes sense to list next. There's always the option to switch to English, but I can't see Italian or Spanish from every other page.
- Rygian 5y ago
  There are countries within Europe where many different languages are spoken.
- skissane 5y ago
  > I don't really see the problem for this website, the languages supported are all European, named after the country they're originally from, (with perhaps US English as the odd one out). As a non-American native speaker of English (Australian), I always feel a little bit excluded when I see an American flag used to represent my native language. I'm not bothered by the UK flag to quite the same extent – can't deny the language originated in England (although maybe one should really use the English flag not the UK one) But I think the ideal is to drop the flags and just call them by their native names – English, Français, Deutsch, etc. Or use ISO 639 codes – EN(G), FR(A), DE(U), etc. (Non-technical audiences might find the codes unfamiliar, but for a programming language website that shouldn't be a concern.) Nobody is going to feel excluded, even in the slightest, by either of those approaches.
  - JimDabell 5y ago
    > I'm not bothered by the UK flag to quite the same extent – can't deny the language originated in England (although maybe one should really use the English flag not the UK one) Consider how that comes across for many people in Northern Ireland, among other places. Just because they speak English, it doesn’t mean they want anything to do with the English (or British) flag. There’s some more discussion on this here: Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult? — https://www.irt.org/articles/js173/ https://www.irt.org/articles/js173/ Don't use flags to indicate languages! — https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-link-lang#flags https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-link-lang#flag... Flag Problems — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flag-problems/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flag-problems/
    - teh_klev 5y ago
      > Consider how that comes across for many people in Northern Ireland, among other places You'd probably find half of the population (loyalists/unionists) would be fine with the butchers apron, whereas the other half (republicans) would find it an annoyance.
  - spullara 5y ago
    USA English and British English are normally distinct in sites that support lots of languages. I think that Australia inherited things like British spelling and is the same? Or are there differences? (Color vs Colour, etc)
    - skissane 5y ago
      No Australian English and British English are different. For example, British say lorry but Australians say truck. Although on the whole Australian English is closer to British than American, that's one case where the opposite is true. (But the word truck doesn't mean quite the same thing in American English and Australian English – in American English it has a broader sense, in Australian English its sense is somewhat more narrow – Australians and Americans would both call a semi-trailer truck a truck, but what Americans call pickup trucks Australians generally don't call trucks, we call them utes instead – that term is pretty much unique to Australian and New Zealand English) And in some cases Australian English matches neither American English or British English. For example, Americans say bell peppers and British say sweet peppers, but Australians say capsicums. (Along with New Zealand English, Malaysian English, Indian English, Pakistani English, Bangladeshi English, and Sri Lankan English.) People need to get away from the idea that there are only two varieties of English, American and British. There are as many varieties of English as there are countries in which English is a major spoken language.
codetrotter 5y ago
I don’t agree completely. If the site is localized into de_DE and fr_FR then it makes perfect sense to use the country flags. In more general terms: When the site is localized into the locale of specific country/nation and that country/nation has that language as its only official language. The official language of Great Britain is English. The various other languages spoken in the countries that are part of UK are regional/local. So using GB flag for locale en_GB is appropriate. US flag for en_US. Brazilian flag for pt_BR. Portuguese flag for pt_PT. Whereas for example Canada has both French and English as official languages right. So if you are writing for fr_CA or en_CA locales then it would be inappropriate indeed to use Canadian flag (since in that case it doesn’t say which language), and equally wrong to use French or USA flag because those flags imply fr_FR and en_US. So if either fr_CA or en_CA is among your target locales, either use text for everything instead of flags, or use flags for the locales that have them and text for fr_CA and en_CA. Likewise for other countries with multiple official languages. Australia apparently has no official language at the federal level. So the Australian flag should not be used for en_AU locale. Instead text should be used for en_AU locale.
- skissane 5y ago
  > Likewise, use GB flag for en_GB locale is cool too, and US flag for en_US. Though with English I suspect many sites may actually not be written in British English and yet they might use GB flag. In that case they are using the wrong flag. A lot of English text isn't clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain dialect. A single text can be a collaborative work between people using different dialects of English and so different parts of the document can end up being spelled in different ways. Spelling differences aren't always as simple as American vs British – -ize spellings are preferred over -ise in American English, yet -ize spelling is also permitted (if less common) in British English (so-called Oxford spelling). I myself speak Australian English, but in certain contexts (especially talking about computers, or at work – I work for a US-based company) I tend to Americanise my English a little bit. Australian English is neither American nor British – it tends to be closer to British mostly (e.g. petrol not gasoline), but sometimes is closer to American instead (e.g. truck not lorry), and sometimes does its own thing–e.g. Americans say bell peppers and the British say sweet peppers but Australians for some reason use the Latin name capsicum (for the mild ones, not the spicy ones) – which is not unique to Australia, New Zealand and Indian English do that too. Anyway, we don't need to tag documents with the precise dialect of English. We all understand each other pretty well anyway. Also, locale != language. Locale is about stuff like date formats, number formats, etc. It is rare for a non-interactive website – as opposed to an interactive webapp - to support multiple locales.
rocqua 5y ago
Why not? It seems perfectly intelligible to me which flag means what language.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  To you, yes - but how would a Taiwanese or PRC person feel if their opposing flags were used to represent their language? (Or me, as a Brit, seeing the US Flag to represent English...) Yes, it's true that languages tend to be country-specific (e.g. en-US: USA, en-GB: UK, pt-BR for Brazilian Portuguese, etc), but while that's technically true, the majority of Indo-European languages that have spread widely across many nations, don't have enough differences between them to justify using a single specific country flag to represent all of them (namely, en-GB, en-CA, en-AU, and en-US, they're hardly even separate dialects). In short: Flags identify countries, not languages. By analogy, it's like using the Java language logo to represent all Java-derived languages (C#, Swift, Golang, Kotlin) because they're mutually-intelligible.
  - 0xjnml 5y ago
    > ... Java-derived languages (C#, Swift, Golang, Kotlin) ... Swift and Go do not belong to that list.

jeroenhd 5y ago

I don't really see the problem for this website, the languages supported are all European, named after the country they're originally from, (with perhaps US English as the odd one out). Things might start getting confusing in countries like India, of course, but I don't see the problem in this specific case. I do have a problem with their homepage related to languages though: you can't get from English to Spanish or Italian on mobile without going through some weird state machine of what language makes sense to list next. There's always the option to switch to English, but I can't see Italian or Spanish from every other page.

Rygian 5y ago
There are countries within Europe where many different languages are spoken.
skissane 5y ago
> I don't really see the problem for this website, the languages supported are all European, named after the country they're originally from, (with perhaps US English as the odd one out). As a non-American native speaker of English (Australian), I always feel a little bit excluded when I see an American flag used to represent my native language. I'm not bothered by the UK flag to quite the same extent – can't deny the language originated in England (although maybe one should really use the English flag not the UK one) But I think the ideal is to drop the flags and just call them by their native names – English, Français, Deutsch, etc. Or use ISO 639 codes – EN(G), FR(A), DE(U), etc. (Non-technical audiences might find the codes unfamiliar, but for a programming language website that shouldn't be a concern.) Nobody is going to feel excluded, even in the slightest, by either of those approaches.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  > I'm not bothered by the UK flag to quite the same extent – can't deny the language originated in England (although maybe one should really use the English flag not the UK one) Consider how that comes across for many people in Northern Ireland, among other places. Just because they speak English, it doesn’t mean they want anything to do with the English (or British) flag. There’s some more discussion on this here: Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult? — https://www.irt.org/articles/js173/ https://www.irt.org/articles/js173/ Don't use flags to indicate languages! — https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-link-lang#flags https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-link-lang#flag... Flag Problems — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flag-problems/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flag-problems/
  - teh_klev 5y ago
    > Consider how that comes across for many people in Northern Ireland, among other places You'd probably find half of the population (loyalists/unionists) would be fine with the butchers apron, whereas the other half (republicans) would find it an annoyance.
- spullara 5y ago
  USA English and British English are normally distinct in sites that support lots of languages. I think that Australia inherited things like British spelling and is the same? Or are there differences? (Color vs Colour, etc)
  - skissane 5y ago
    No Australian English and British English are different. For example, British say lorry but Australians say truck. Although on the whole Australian English is closer to British than American, that's one case where the opposite is true. (But the word truck doesn't mean quite the same thing in American English and Australian English – in American English it has a broader sense, in Australian English its sense is somewhat more narrow – Australians and Americans would both call a semi-trailer truck a truck, but what Americans call pickup trucks Australians generally don't call trucks, we call them utes instead – that term is pretty much unique to Australian and New Zealand English) And in some cases Australian English matches neither American English or British English. For example, Americans say bell peppers and British say sweet peppers, but Australians say capsicums. (Along with New Zealand English, Malaysian English, Indian English, Pakistani English, Bangladeshi English, and Sri Lankan English.) People need to get away from the idea that there are only two varieties of English, American and British. There are as many varieties of English as there are countries in which English is a major spoken language.

codetrotter 5y ago

I don’t agree completely. If the site is localized into de_DE and fr_FR then it makes perfect sense to use the country flags. In more general terms: When the site is localized into the locale of specific country/nation and that country/nation has that language as its only official language. The official language of Great Britain is English. The various other languages spoken in the countries that are part of UK are regional/local. So using GB flag for locale en_GB is appropriate. US flag for en_US. Brazilian flag for pt_BR. Portuguese flag for pt_PT. Whereas for example Canada has both French and English as official languages right. So if you are writing for fr_CA or en_CA locales then it would be inappropriate indeed to use Canadian flag (since in that case it doesn’t say which language), and equally wrong to use French or USA flag because those flags imply fr_FR and en_US. So if either fr_CA or en_CA is among your target locales, either use text for everything instead of flags, or use flags for the locales that have them and text for fr_CA and en_CA. Likewise for other countries with multiple official languages. Australia apparently has no official language at the federal level. So the Australian flag should not be used for en_AU locale. Instead text should be used for en_AU locale.

skissane 5y ago
> Likewise, use GB flag for en_GB locale is cool too, and US flag for en_US. Though with English I suspect many sites may actually not be written in British English and yet they might use GB flag. In that case they are using the wrong flag. A lot of English text isn't clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain dialect. A single text can be a collaborative work between people using different dialects of English and so different parts of the document can end up being spelled in different ways. Spelling differences aren't always as simple as American vs British – -ize spellings are preferred over -ise in American English, yet -ize spelling is also permitted (if less common) in British English (so-called Oxford spelling). I myself speak Australian English, but in certain contexts (especially talking about computers, or at work – I work for a US-based company) I tend to Americanise my English a little bit. Australian English is neither American nor British – it tends to be closer to British mostly (e.g. petrol not gasoline), but sometimes is closer to American instead (e.g. truck not lorry), and sometimes does its own thing–e.g. Americans say bell peppers and the British say sweet peppers but Australians for some reason use the Latin name capsicum (for the mild ones, not the spicy ones) – which is not unique to Australia, New Zealand and Indian English do that too. Anyway, we don't need to tag documents with the precise dialect of English. We all understand each other pretty well anyway. Also, locale != language. Locale is about stuff like date formats, number formats, etc. It is rare for a non-interactive website – as opposed to an interactive webapp - to support multiple locales.

rocqua 5y ago

Why not? It seems perfectly intelligible to me which flag means what language.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
To you, yes - but how would a Taiwanese or PRC person feel if their opposing flags were used to represent their language? (Or me, as a Brit, seeing the US Flag to represent English...) Yes, it's true that languages tend to be country-specific (e.g. en-US: USA, en-GB: UK, pt-BR for Brazilian Portuguese, etc), but while that's technically true, the majority of Indo-European languages that have spread widely across many nations, don't have enough differences between them to justify using a single specific country flag to represent all of them (namely, en-GB, en-CA, en-AU, and en-US, they're hardly even separate dialects). In short: Flags identify countries, not languages. By analogy, it's like using the Java language logo to represent all Java-derived languages (C#, Swift, Golang, Kotlin) because they're mutually-intelligible.
- 0xjnml 5y ago
  > ... Java-derived languages (C#, Swift, Golang, Kotlin) ... Swift and Go do not belong to that list.