Re: English Flag

Dear Glynn,

This mailing-list (www-validator) is not quite the right forum for your
feedback, so I'm copying my answer to the right channel.

On Wed, Sep 12, 2007, Glynn Williams wrote:
> Hi Sorry to be so pedantic about something so little, especially as 
> you're trying to help, but you have a flag named wrong in your resources 
> area:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/Icons/Flags/english.tiff

I think you are reading too much into this URI. URIs are opaque,
and if you are trying to read anything from them, you are mistaken.
[[ The only thing you can use an identifier for is to refer to an
object. When you are not dereferencing you should not look at the
contents of the URI string to gain other information as little as
possible. ]]  http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#opaque

In this case, actually, I am fairly certain that the choice of "english"
for the URI was motivated by the fact that, a long time ago (the
resource is so old I can't even date it with our usual tools) someone
uploaded this image to www.w3.org to be used as a marker for the
"english" language. Note that since then, a bit of sense and research
have shown that flags were seldom a good idea to indicate language:
http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/#ri20040808.173208643

> Could you please rename the flag as united_kingdom.tiff please, pretty
> please?

IMHO, this is very unnecessary. It's not like there is a page on w3.org
(incorrectly) stating that this is the flag of England...

-- 
olivier

Received on Wednesday, 12 September 2007 13:32:33 UTC