Why Did Apple Take the Israeli Flag Out of Mac OS Yosemite?

http://qz.com/297150/why-did-apple-take-the-israeli-flag-out-of-mac-os-yosemite/

by abdullahdiaa • 12 years ago

3 1 12 years ago

There a difference between countries and languages. Countries have flags, languages have not.

Countries are codified by the ISO 3166 standard, with numeric codes, 2-character codes and 3-character codes. Israël has the 2-character ISO-3166 code "IL", Canada has the 2-character code "CA".

Languages are codified by the ISO 639a standard, with 2-character codes. Hebrew has the 2-character ISO-639a code "he". French has the 2-character ISO-639a code "fr".

Notice that country codes are uppercase letters, while language codes are lower case letter. So FR is France, while fr is French.

Notice also how Canadian living in Quebec and wanting to read and write French could be obfuscated to have a French flag in the menu bar, like French people in France wanting to read and write hebrew should be obfuscated to get the Israël flag in the menu bar.

The question is not why they took off the Isralei flag, but why there remains any flag at all? (Apart perhaps from the Esperanto flag, which is AFAIK, the only language having a flag! :-) ).

Why Did Apple Take the Israeli Flag Out of Mac OS Yosemite?

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