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Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

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

#111

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Kwpolska wrote: post #109
Alex-Programs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Given that it's the fourth-most-common language in Switzerland, the Swiss flag might not be a good choice.

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

#112

Post by GuB-42 »

josephcsible wrote: post #40

I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.

My idea is that an app should do its best to work with the OS and not override defaults, that includes system fonts. It is good for consistency, accessibility, etc... If Windows doesn't ship with flag emoji, or any character for that matter, that shouldn't be Chrome's problem.

Android is an OS, Google is responsible of it, so they get to decide what goes in their fonts.

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

#113

Post by SllX »

culi wrote: post #85
toolslive wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)

That's not the only issue. India has over 1,600 native languages and 22 "official" ones. Which language would a country like that represent? What about colonial nations like the US or most of South America. Do the native languages not get a symbol because a colonial history resulted in a foreign language being the dominant one?

Depends.

The Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation both have flags to use that could theoretically be incorporated into Unicode if they didn't draw the line at National flags, but you could always draw flag representations in SVG instead.

But I also think this discussion has gone so far into the theoretical it's kind of ignored a very practical point: how many languages do you need to present in your software, because your software is actually localized in that language? Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country (and even some of those are relatively obscure), and countries that have >1 languages usually share an official language with another country that uses it more predominantly. At this point in time, the economies of scale do not favor actually localizing software in 1600 different languages, so we don't. At all.

In fact, the usual pattern for developers from Europe and the Americas is to favor their dominant language and localizing in other dominant languages that originated in Europe and some of their more popular variants, and then maybe also some combination of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindu, Urdu, and Korean.

So when you're presented with a number of languages and variants exceeding 30 in a list, flags probably aren't going to cut it anymore, but there's still some design space to use flags as language representations if you want.

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

#114

Post by marcosdumay »

toolslive wrote: post #61
ahoka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.

Canada?

In area, yes. But then the China flag would represent a dozen languages.

In population, no, the GP is correct.

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

#115

Post by culi »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #101
culi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Ctrl + F

And it doesn't have to have every single language. There's over 7,000 languages in the world. It just needs to have languages for which content exists. For the vast vast majority of Wikipedia articles there are less than 10 languages available

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

#116

Post by Kwpolska »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #102
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

And United Nations defines national borders, but countries disagree with that and complain to Microsoft, not the UN. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

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

#117

Post by Kwpolska »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #15
fweimer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed country borders from the time zone selection in a Windows 95 update: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42... In Bing Maps, I expect them change country borders based on localization settings, but that was probably too onerous to implement and test in the Windows 95 days.

I remember when this happened, which I guess makes me very old. They didn't actually remove the map - they just removed any functionality it had. So the time set window is massive for no reason, it contains this huge world map bitmap that no longer does anything.

Almost nothing, it scrolls horizontally to show the selected time zone in the middle.

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

#118

Post by culi »

SllX wrote: post #113
culi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the only issue. India has over 1,600 native languages and 22 "official" ones. Which language would a country like that represent? What about colonial nations like the US or most of South America. Do the native languages not get a symbol because a colonial history resulted in a foreign language being the dominant one?

Depends. The Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation both have flags to use that could theoretically be incorporated into Unicode if they didn't draw the line at National flags, but you could always draw flag representations in SVG instead. But I also think this discussion has gone so far into the theoretical it's kind of ignored a very practical point: how many languages do you need to present in your software, because yo…

> Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country

There are over 30 languages in India with at least a million NATIVE speakers. 7 of those are in the top 30 most spoken languages in the world

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

#119

Post by ggm »

Found with related issues in work contexts that people can be very forgiving of baked-in things, and simply block on new entrants.

If you ship android as-is from a GIT repo that has you can be ok. If you write an app or show slideware which refers to you are in the naughty corner for a while.

It's because people who are responding are responding intelligently. They know what they can effect: the future. The past, is another country. They can't get the git repo to ban the but they can make your life hell for including it.

So to an outsider this looks "inconsistent" but its (in my opinion) entirely internally consistent: Only act on things you can influence.

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

#120

Post by terinjokes »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #68
harrall wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a good budget for localization at my previous place and had like 10 Englishes and some countries had both their local language and English as options.

Oh man, international corporations forcing me into the translation of their website is a huge pet peeve of mine, as the translation is usually poor. Just let me choose ‘Netherlands - English’ and I’ll be on my way, please and thanks.

Still annoyed I have to patch in en_NL on all my systems because glibc developers don't think it's legitimate.
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