Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfmike | Hacker News Reader

Great response that flags correlate to regions too and not 1:1 country usage, so this would be an exception to the standard. Also that the iso standard is that for zh_tw, so using that standard is within spec. Also the comment that no flag is visually not aligned with other lines having flags. All logical and rational reasons not to omit unrelated to politics.

View on HN

There are also plenty of non-country entities that have flags. I live in Buffalo, New York, USA. There's a flag for the USA, a flag for the state of New York, and even the city has its own flag[1]. So even if we accept that Taiwan isn't a country there's no reason an island can't have a flag!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Buffalo,_New_York

I'm not sure the ISO standard specifies a flag though.

Code zh-tw means the Chinese variant used in Taiwan. The technically correct code for Traditional Chinese is zh-hant.

It’s an entirely separate issue from the flag, but the developer technically should label the languages “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)” in the dropdown instead, to better correspond to the flags.

No. The dropdowns reflect Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages, not countries.

It depends on how you view it. If you want to show flags, use the region to annotate the language. If you want to show the script variant (Traditional vs Simplified), don’t use flags. I don’t see how you can naively come to the conclusion only one of these is acceptable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com