Features/Language-List-Flags

To do

The flags are remained. It looks good. People don't know the ISO 639-3 of those which have flags, but it's not important. It's so nice of you to insist keeping flags. Each language can only have no more than one flag. I think there can be some principles of choosing them:

Flags can only be of languages, countries, regions, international organizations, cultures or ethnics.

Each flag should be an actual flag, not a Tatoeba flag. For example, the flag of Latin can be Vatican City's flag (because there are too many possible banners of Rome, so people can't make a consensus of which one is the best); Ancient Greek can be Byzantine flag.

Each flag should be standard before being modificated. Modifications are limited to resizing (better to keep the original length-width ratio), crop, fill in. Maybe those country flag icons need to be changed to cater to this.

Each flag can only represent no more than one language.

Macrolanguages will not have flags, because they don't appear much. They should leave the flags for the individuals. Macrolanguages can have flags when there is no enough flags for individuals.

If there are more than one flag of a language:

1. Choose the most original one. For example, the flag of Portugese should be Portugese flag instead of Brazilian flag. But Standard Arabic is considered to be an international norm, so its flag should be Arab League's;
2. Choose the most popular one. For example, the flag of Korean should be South Korean flag instead of North Korean flag. But if they have very similar popularities, it should be suspended;
3. Choose the less controversial one. For example, the flag of Ossetian should be the North Ossetian flag instead of South Ossetian flag.
4. Choose the best-looking one, according to vexillology. But it should have been more popular already.

If there are more than one language for a flag:

1. Choose the most popular one. The flag of Afghanistan may represent Pashto or Dari, but it should be Pashto, because it has a lot more speakers than Dari;
2. Choose the most precise one. The flag of Philipine may represent Tagalog and Filipino, but it should be Filipino, because Philipine's official language is "Filipino", the standard form of Tagalog.

We will need 3 sizes:

• Small = 16 pixels X 11 pixels. Type = .GIF (what we have now)
• Medium = ? pixels X ? pixels. Type = .GIF
• Large = ? pixels X ? pixels. Type = .JPG

GrimPixel: 16px is very difficult for recognizing some flags, e.g. Kirgiz and Yue Chinese. Wikipedia provides 64px as the smallest for all. I think you don't need modifications, because it's too hard to keep some trait without distortion. You can just keep original length-width ratio, and arrange them at the middle of 1:2 ratio. and arrange all flags to have the same area.

Vincent: GOOD JOB !! :) As, I do not want to "break" the site, I need the very small one (16*11) to keep it exactely the same as now but I need other sizes too for future improvements. For example, I need the 16*11 size for the Language Search Box. If the flag is too big, it will make the search results too big. If I remove the small size right now, I need to make hundreds of changes on the site right now, while if I use exactely the same I don't need to do anything except adding the flags.

PNG and SVG seems to be more popular for flags. What about using SVG? Vincent: same reply: keep the GIF now. GIF and JPG work good. I try to avoid changing what is working as there is already too much to do on what is not working LoL :)

Also they should not to be confused with country flags. So country flags should be larger. Vincent: I'll use the new country flags you suggested before, they are not of the same shape so we will not confuse them.

GrimPixel: I remember someone criticised Tatoeba for hosting flags of separatists. I will try to note those flags being used by separatists, and we decide how to do with them later.

Columns description

• flag: flag existing nowvery
• URL: Write image URL to the "large size" imageLis