KeyboardLayoutProposal

Keyboard Layout Taxonomy Proposal

Currently the keyboard layout is categorized by countries, which might not be suitable because it may bring following issues:

1. Country flags (which may cause political problems)
2. Not fair for the countries which are not in the list, e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, etc...
3. Some layout is also available in certain countries but not recognized, e.g. Dvorak in China and India.
4. Produce redundancy, like QWERTY in US, CN, IN are actually the same, but need to list 3 times.
5. Some layouts, like EurKEY, do not belong to one particular country

Proposed Keyboard Layout Taxonomy

Use the keyboard layout itself as categories, such like:

• QWERTY-- Default
  • ja_JP
  • ko_KR,
  • de_CH
  • fr_CH
  • it_CH
  • en_UK
  • EurKEY? (see discussion)
  • ...
• DVORAK
  • @lefthand
  • @righthand
• QWERTZ
  • de_CH
    • @SunDeadKey
    • @NOSunDeadKey
    • @Mac
  • fr_CH
  • it_CH
  • ...
• AZERTY
  • fr_FR
  • fr_BE

This taxonomy is more concise than countries-oriented. Users do not need to scroll the long countries list; and input method developers can easily have brief idea that what are they going to deal with.