Benji Weber schrieb am Mittwoch 10 September 2008:
Well I'm not sure that using flags at all is a good idea. The w3c recommends against it[0], see their reasoning.
Flags make it most intuitive to understand that this is the selector that somehow deals with i18n. Imagine a visitor who speaks only spanish enters the english website (assumed that language detection failed). How can he visually identify the language switcher? I showed our solution to a lot of different people (~20) with a lot of different computing skills without explanation, asking them to find the language switcher. All of them found it instantly, all of them explaining that the flag helped a lot.
The union flag is not ideal because other languages are spoken in the United Kingdom - such as Welsh[1]. The St George's cross would represent English/England, or a combination of the Commonwealth flag[2] and the flag of the United States of America would cover most of the English-Speaking world, but I don't really think using a country to pick a language makes much sense.
I would postpone this discussion when we have welsh translations and the like. Maybe we worked out a better solution until then. Right now, the flags are just an indicator for i18n, combined with the name of the language which works out quite well in the most common usecases. I guess we start off with a limited number of translations, e.g. English, Spanish, French and German. I would appreciate if we manage to have a russian and a chinese version soon after. Maybe Karl Eichwalder can address the translation lists. Greets, Andreas -- Skype: andreas.demmer ICQ: 103 924 771 http://www.andreas-demmer.de