Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

hecate.pink

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 111 posts

Re: Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

#62

Post by throwaway290 »

decimalenough wrote: post #54
bawolff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. My point still stands, you can already encode Taiwan's flag, so what is China allegedly objecting to?

There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other t…

Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment.

Re: Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

#63

Post by novemp »

telotortium wrote: post #59

I hate to be rude, but I found the writing quite difficult to follow in its technical aspects, and the pink and black glitter formatting was the last straw. I ended up dumping it into ChatGPT to rewrite the technical content in a form that’s easier to follow, in the hopes of elevating the discussion - I hope I don’t have to do this often on HN, but the technical story was interesting enough that it’s worth rescuing:…

[flagged]

Re: Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

#64

Post by cluckindan »

throwaway290 wrote: post #62
decimalenough wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other t…

Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment.

Taiwan is the last vestige of original ”China” and PRC already redefined it when Taiwan (ROC) lost the mainland to the communists in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War.

Re: Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

#66

Post by p1anecrazy »

telotortium wrote: post #59

I hate to be rude, but I found the writing quite difficult to follow in its technical aspects, and the pink and black glitter formatting was the last straw. I ended up dumping it into ChatGPT to rewrite the technical content in a form that’s easier to follow, in the hopes of elevating the discussion - I hope I don’t have to do this often on HN, but the technical story was interesting enough that it’s worth rescuing:…

Your take is very subjective. I found the story captivating and technically clear.

Re: Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

#67

Post by decimalenough »

throwaway290 wrote: post #62
decimalenough wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other t…

Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment.

Legally speaking, Taiwan is a province of China according to both the PRC and ROC. Of course, they both claim that they are the "China" in question.

Re: Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

#69

Post by gmueckl »

As much as I appreciate the expressiveness that comes from emojis and flags in Unicode, I am rather shocked by the growing technical complexity of decoding unicode into rwndwrable graphemes. Unicode was already worryingly complex before all of these new combinations were introduced. Properly parsing Unicode is close to obtaining this "don't roll your own" status that has has so far been reserved for the likes of networking and cryptography libraries. Unicode, even if UTF-8 encoded, is now such a far cry from the old 8 bit charsets that's still being inplicitly assumed by so many standard libraries of programming languages.
Post reply on HN