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

Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

geyer.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 328 posts

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#101

Post by do_not_redeem »

culi wrote: post #88
troad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel obliged to point out that while flags do not represent languages perfectly, there is no good, user-facing symbolic alternative for languages. No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages. For the most common languages,…

Places like Wikipedia have a list of languages spelled out in the orthography most used for the written version of that language. I don't see what the problem with that is. Universally understandable to anyone who knows the written version of their language

That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#102

Post by ivanjermakov »

bawolff wrote: post #99

Flag emoijis are a political nightmare. Who is a country? Who is an autonomous region? Which flag to use for disputed countries (e.g. do you use the taliban flag for afghanistan despite how much the western world doesn't like it). Not to mention people might not like the flag changing in their own messages after a take over. Imagine if russia wins the war in ukraine and all the patriotic ukrainians suddenly have the…

While I agree that there might be political concerns regarding national flag appearance, but Unicode clearly defines country codes and corresponding country names: https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#103

Post by pentacent_hq »

Very helpful post! I was using flag emojis on a landing page and completely unaware that they weren't being rendered correctly on Windows.

The author mentions a polyfill [1] and the fact that they dislike it's using a CDN. Fortunately, the polyfill can be configured to use a local/self-hosted font:

> polyfillCountryFlags(fontName?: string, fontUrl?: string)

Here's how I added it to my Astro landing page: https://github.com/pentacent/keila-web/commit/e96ec233eef631...

[1] https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#104

Post by [deleted] »

scrollaway wrote: post #97
troad wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen. > Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?

You’re saying this on HN, where plenty of people work on software affecting tens of millions of people. You wanna leave your phone number and explain your “well I ain’t offended” strategy to the next PM who’ll ask you about their users in Taiwan? The Russian speakers in Ukraine who saw their homes demolished by those who brandish the flag you’re not offended by? Maybe I should just invite you to my country of Belgium…

[deleted]

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#105

Post by LAC-Tech »

IshKebab wrote: post #33
int_19h wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just refuse to commit. E.g. Google Maps, to this day, will not show the country for any Crimean city when you click on it to bring up its info panel. If you do this with e.g. Kherson, you get "Kherson, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine". But if you do it with Sevastopol, you only get the city name, not the region & country. It also shows dotted borders between Crimea and both Russia and Ukraine.

Well... that kind of makes sense no? What do you think it should say?

I want maps to show reality. Not who they *think* should be in control of Taiwan or Transnistria, but who actually is.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#106

Post by boredatoms »

bawolff wrote: post #100
troad wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen. > Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?

> As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen. As an australian, when was the last time the Australian flag was the incorrect choice for you? I'm going to guess never.

When is there ever an Australian flag to choose

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#107

Post by LAC-Tech »

fsckboy wrote: post #48

yes, we know, there are historical territorial disputes all over the world. But can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?

Chinese denialism over Taiwan is really, really demented. It's not that they just claim Taiwan - they pretend they already own it, and stick their fingers in their ears if you point out facts on the ground.

I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#108

Post by zdragnar »

closewith wrote: post #78
xdennis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. Yes, every language has a name and you can use that. If you prefer an imprecise flag over the actual name of the language then what you're saying is that you prefer style over substance. There's always space to show the language name.

Are you seriously arguing against the use of ideograms? User interfaces without them would be unusable.

Many languages don't correspond to flag ideograms, and many flags don't correspond to a single language.

Ideograms are fine so long as they can be replaced with a canonical word or phrase and still make sense.

Flags for languages fails that in many cases around the world- if I want to select Quebecoise French, neither the Canadian, French, or Quebec Province flags are appropriate.

Likewise, Switzerland has no official language, and many countries such as Belgium have multiple.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#109

Post by Kwpolska »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #98
slater wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say people from countries with multiple languages. E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English. Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.

There are very few countries with multiple equally-influential languages that don't have better alternatives for flags. It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags. Countries may have ambi…

> It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags.

Okay, which flag do you use to indicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language — one of the four official languages of Switzerland?

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#110

Post by kelseyfrog »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #57
tobr wrote: post #10

Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages.

Should there be emojis to represent languages? Maybe it could be a new group. I'd rather not use the flag shape, maybe a circle with the 2 letter code and a background with the colors from the flag usually used to represent that language, mainly because people is already used to scan the lists looking for those colors.

It would be great if there were. I decided to see if such a thing existed and came across the Flag icons for languages page[1]. There is an absolutely hideous French, Belgium, Canadian mix flag so the bar for language emojis is very very low. In other words, it should be easy to do better.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages

Post reply on HN