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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

#141

Post by fsckboy »

mjr00 wrote: post #138
fsckboy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, (a) that's not the essence of my question and (b) I was not asking the essence of my question, I was asking literally my question. Microsoft would not respond to North Korea by deleting all the unicode flags all over the world, so while that might get you closer to the essence of your question, there's no point in me asking my question if you are just going to dodge it.

Your question was > can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)? I gave one (of many) examples where this would be relevant for a country other than China. If you don't think South Korea is politically important enough to matter, then use the Israel/Palestinian flag situation as something that certainly is. Or more simply: no, this is not just because of Ch…

saying "it's North Korea" does not make a case that it's North Korea (especially when I acknowledged these disputes are all around the world, indicating that I understood that already). Fail.

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

#142

Post by rozab »

scrollaway wrote: post #30
hunter2_ wrote: post #7

> My approach was to draw an American flag emoji and then look at the pixels to see if any of them contained a non-grayscale color. This works because the Windows fallback emoji is just black/white text This is the kind of thing that works great for a while, and then an OS update flips the table on how RGB subpixel antialiasing works for the subset of your users with a certain type of display, leading to a false posi…

Unicode doesn’t have codepoints for any of these. Unicode has defined a singular generic way to transform iso country codes (not even — just two of any characters), and says it’s how you do flags.

No, unicode define the region subtags here

https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/comm...

You can see the country names alongside the codepoints here, ctrl+f for 'taiwan' and 'palestinian territories'

https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt

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

#143

Post by gruez »

qingcharles wrote: post #74
danjl wrote: post #20

Does this problem disappear if you specify your own font for your site, like Roboto?

You can also do like a lot of major sites and just identify the codepoints and replace them with images as a kludge. I think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke".

>think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke".

Funny you say that, considering it originally was an actual gun, then companies progressively changed it to a water gun until it was the defacto standard. I guess if something got changed for "woke" reasons, and it sticks around long enough, you can dunk on the guy changing it back for being "anti-woke"?

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

#144

Post by lifthrasiir »

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.

Noto Color Emoji weighs more than 20 MB, which makes it difficult to embed to the browser. I think that's mainly due to the embedded PNGs so it would be technically possible to get rid of them and use vector fonts for special occasions, though. (In fact, I believe Firefox did so with its built-in Twemoji.)

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

#145

Post by dgfitz »

rozab wrote: post #142
scrollaway wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode doesn’t have codepoints for any of these. Unicode has defined a singular generic way to transform iso country codes (not even — just two of any characters), and says it’s how you do flags.

No, unicode define the region subtags here https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/comm... You can see the country names alongside the codepoints here, ctrl+f for 'taiwan' and 'palestinian territories' https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt

I welcome the day I can identify my home as a territory and have it legally recognized.

Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?

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

#146

Post by lifthrasiir »

dgfitz wrote: post #145
rozab wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unicode define the region subtags here https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/comm... You can see the country names alongside the codepoints here, ctrl+f for 'taiwan' and 'palestinian territories' https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt

I welcome the day I can identify my home as a territory and have it legally recognized. Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?

Subtags are derived from ISO 3166-2, so you want to contact its maintenance agency.

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

#147

Post by AraceliHarker »

Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used, such as Simplified Chinese and Hebrew versions. However, Microsoft is not a company that respects the culture and language of each country. It has a bad habit of forcing what it decides in Redmond all over the world.

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

#148

Post by saagarjha »

crazygringo wrote: post #71
bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly. Then of course the multitude of languages spoken in many european languages such as Spain (catalan, gallician, basque). Or the latin american variation. Or what about Switzerland who dont have their own language (they speak french, german, italian and romanch). Even your example of Swed…

> Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly. Curious, do Indian websites just never use flags then? Or do they use flags for the states within India? Because at a quick glance, it seems like there is a general mapping of languages to one or more states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

This doesn’t really work, though, because while languages are vaguely correlated to regions of the country they don’t match up with entities that have flags. It’s like if the US south had a language common there: what icon would you use? Alabama? It’s also worth noting that just because a language is used in a particular region doesn’t mean it is actually dominant. Coming back to the US, it would be kind of like marking the American southwest as “Spanish” because a lot of people speak it there, and many at home, but even while most conversations in public happen in English.

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

#149

Post by andreareina »

scrollaway wrote: post #30
hunter2_ wrote: post #7

> My approach was to draw an American flag emoji and then look at the pixels to see if any of them contained a non-grayscale color. This works because the Windows fallback emoji is just black/white text This is the kind of thing that works great for a while, and then an OS update flips the table on how RGB subpixel antialiasing works for the subset of your users with a certain type of display, leading to a false posi…

Unicode doesn’t have codepoints for any of these. Unicode has defined a singular generic way to transform iso country codes (not even — just two of any characters), and says it’s how you do flags.

IIRC someone else started it by applying a ligature to the appropriate regional indicator pairs, then Unicode adopted it.

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

#150

Post by anal_reactor »

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.

> I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages

I feel obliged to point out that majority of engineers get stuck in 3-hour-long meeting discussing corner cases "is Okinawan a separate language" or "what even is a language", while refusing to address the business problem at hand, which is "I want my European user to pick between Italian, French and Spanish". I used to enjoy these "yes but technically no" discussions, but then I understood they never lead anywhere, because they're about solving the problem in some imaginary world that only exists in some people's heads, rather than the real one.

The truth is that there exist situations where using country flags is effective means of communicating the idea of a language. You might not like it, but that's how it works.

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