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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 10/13/88 11:37
On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, David Segall wrote:
> Dylan Parry <usenet@dylanparry.com> wrote:
>
> >Pondering the eternal question of "Hobnobs or Rich Tea?", David Segall
> >finally proclaimed:
> >
> >> I have the usual flags to denote various languages
> >
> >Stop right there. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html
>
> Your argument (I assume you agree) is basically "Don't use icons
> because they may be misunderstood and/or offend someone".
Then you haven't read the article properly.
> It contradicts a thirty year history in the development of user
> interfaces but, of course, that does not mean that you are wrong.
Take a look at http://www.google.co.uk/language_tools, for example.
I won't say that everything that Google does is right, but this seems
OK to me. The flags denote *countries*. The languages are denoted by
their *names*.
Any other interpretation of national flags is doomed, except in a
limited number of special cases. But special cases are a poor
starting point for anything that's meant to work in a WWW situation.
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