Standardizing icon names: flags

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 15:15 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:

> And standards shouldn't be political issues. I don't know why people
> keep trying to turn them into that. It's pointless and just creates a
> bunch of useless e-mail to fill lists with, when we could just take
> the simple nihilistic approach and specify enough to get a standard,
> but not so much we piss off a bunch of narrow-minded people.

Countries (and flags) are primarily political entities. Any standard
which attempts to include a list of them is inherently political, in the
same way that a list of political parties is. There's far too much
history bound up in this. A standard that defines what form names should
take but doesn't specify what the definitive list of those names is is
an excellent idea that solves the issue nicely - anyone who wants to get
involved in the pain and misery of offending large numbers of people can
do so and conform to standards at the same time, and we don't get blamed
for any of it :)

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org