Avoiding Problems by Avoiding Decisions

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Tuesday 18 May 2004 04:44, Don Sanders wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 May 2004 09:33, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > On Monday 17 May 2004 05:04, Don Sanders wrote:
> > > After reading Jason Keirstead's post and following his links I
> > > suggest that in addition to this the flags should be removed as
> > > well.
> > >
> > > FWIW that is what GNOME and Red Hat have decided to do. I think
> > > the flags are the cause of more insult/offense than the names and
> > > that it makes sense to completely remove them.
> >
> > IMO it's ridiculous to remove all flags just because there is a
> > handful of controversial ones. Did you even consider the impact on
> > usability?
>
> The usability issue that I'm concerned about is making KDE usable for
> Chinese.

... and less usable for everyone else.

> > And what about KPPP which also lists country names because the
> > providers are for obvious reasons categorized by country names.
>
> Perhaps I'm a little behind head CVS or looking in the wrong place
> but in my kppp normal folder icons appear next to country names in
> the accounting section.

This whole discussion started because of country names (well, one 
country's name actually). Sorry, for mixing country name and flag 
issues.

> > Or the timezone configuration of the clock applet. Oh my god, the
> > timezone is identified by flags and city names. Removing the flags
> > would be a cool idea because then the user would have to read all
> > city names (provided he can read) instead of simply looking for a
> > flag that looks vaguely familiar to him.
>
> Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place or are a bit out of date I
> don't see any flags here just country name / city name e.g.
> "Australia/Brisbane".

KDE 3.2. Right click on clock applet, Configure Clock, Timezones.

> > But why categorize
> > timezones at all by countries/flags/cities?> Why don't we simply
> > replace this by a KHalfIntegralNumInput and let the user select the
> > offset of UTC?
>
> Many people may know their country name and city name but not their
> UTC offset.

This proposal was sarcastic.

> > Or the keyboard layout selection. Currently a nice flag with an
> > overlayed country code is shown. What do you want to do about
> > layouts like de_DE, de_CH and de_AT if the flags are removed? They
> > would be all displayed as "de".
>
> Append or prepend the country name to distinguish between them.

Doesn't fit in the system tray.

Regards,
Ingo
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