Re: [xwiki-devs] Bundle flag icons in XE

On 11/01/2013 10:10 AM, Denis Gervalle wrote: Indeed, many sites do this, contrary to best practices. But I haven't seen in a long time a *major* site that does it, and let's not do things just because other do them as well. Yes, that is indeed true. Flags work even better in one of the more common use cases for XWiki, a collaborative intranet for a company with offices in a few countries, to indicate not as much a language, but a country. So and so. It works for differentiating between different country-wise versions of a language, but if you go even larger, what about: - nl_BE versus fr_BE versus en_BE - different dialects of the same language in a large country? Sicilian versus standard Italian? Even deeper: Western Sicilian versus Ennese versus Pantesco versus... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language#Dialects_of_Sicilian Agreed. So, to be clear, I'm not saying -1 for ever using a flag symbol in XWiki, just to the original issue that prompted the discussion, faceted search based on language. While both famfamfam and your icons do look nice, I have to say that I'm not 100% confident in any of them. One thing that is too often ignored is that flag colors are very well defined and should be represented precisely. The French flag isn't just any blue, any white, any red. And while I can see that the underlying color is indeed the right one, the 3D effects added on top of them change the colors significantly. So I'd rather have a less shiny version of flags that have more of the original colors in them. Plus, this also goes in the "flat" direction that interface design is into right now. famfamfam isn't that polished and consistent, it looks very amateurish. I've looked at the ad, md, ro and td flags (all of which are blue-yellow-red), and they have different border shadings (the ro one is missing shading on the red color completely, unlike the others, and some look more 3D than others), the aspect of the colors are wrong (they should be different, but not as they are now, whith md blue=ro blue, and ad blue so much lighter it looks like sky blue), they don't respect the required proportions (ad should have a wider yellow strip)... Another concern is that these icons are very small raster images, so they can't be nicely scaled to fit larger UIs. I don't have a good solution for the moment. http://flags.blogpotato.de/ looks a bit better than famfamfam (it has more flags, larger icons, marker and round flags, look a bit more polished, but still not perfect). Another option would be to spend time into designing scalable SVG images, and offer them as another free alternative (as good citizens of the internet), but that's not something that is our responsibility.

Something that works for simpler flags is to design them as CSS icons, which doesn't require any image at all. This can be done ad-hoc as needed for each flag, and doesn't require any external resource. So, since we don't have a perfect solution, and the need for flag icons has been postponed, I'd rather not hurry and add something we might regret later. Let's not forget that this is a kind of an API once we add them, and would require respecting the backwards compatibility policy to remove or replace them.