Live data from Hacker News

Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

geyer.dev

151–160 of 328 posts

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

#151
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically every place in the world where it's disputed whether it's part of another country or independent creates a flag issue. Do you include a Quebec flag? Northern Ireland? Somaliland? Palestine?

what I asked was to convince me that this is not about China. you have failed to convince me that this is about quebec, somalililand or palestine, those are absurd notions, so you have failed to convince me that this is not about china.

I find it entirely plausible that it's about Palestine (in the sense that that would be sufficient cause for MS to want to avoid shipping a list of countries even if there wasn't a China/Taiwan issue) given that e.g. several US states have laws that make companies ineligible for public contracts if they participate in boycotting Israel. To say nothing of wanting to make sales in Israel itself.

(Of course it won't really be about any one thing, it will be about all of these things - and China is probably the biggest and most relevant case. But it's by no means the only one)

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

#152

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. 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 mark…

[deleted]

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

#153
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had initially posted a joke reply to this, but I'll post a serious one: I care a lot more about getting necessary services to elderly, semi-literate Russian-speaking babushkas fleeing Ukraine, by giving them an obvious indicator (on e.g. a name tag) that someone can speak to them, help them, then I care about your completely absurd, concocted 'well akshuallys'.

I work in Brussels with a lot of Ukrainians — both fighters and refugees. I’ve made this a part of my day to day life since the full scale invasion. We until recently even shared an office with the Ukrainian Voices refugee committee, in fact.

Seeing as you say you care about getting services to those people, let’s talk about putting your money where your keyboard is. Reach out via my profile and let me know how much you’d like to contribute.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think of the dev/test/PM people who worked on this feature.

It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al.

The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.

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

#156
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…

What flag would you use for Malay on a Singaporean site[1]?

> From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?

That flag cloud is actually hard for me to parse because where am I supposed to look for italian? I did find it, but I literally had to do a sequential scan because there's no apparent order to them. I would use a combo box searchable by: ISO language code, language name in english, language name in native language and script. It's clear what it's asking for, pretty much everyone is going to know at least one of the things it's asking for, it's not completely ascii centric. Flags can be added for some visual flair, and if you actually distinguish between (i.e. have different versions for) en-US and en-GB and en-SG, more power to you.

Tangential nit: nuenki.app shows the SPQR flag for (presumably) latin, but in the Language dropdown it's Latin (Classical) :classical_building::eagle:. Argh.

[1] https://book.health.gov.sg/

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

#157
> Can you imagine if, gasp, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror!

Just playing devil’s advocate but I kind of get it

If there was a separatist region you felt wasn’t legitimate or entirely delusional in both their existence and their aims, and third parties started giving them legitimacy with flags that your former neighbor made up at night, you would be like “cmon, wtf, cut that out”

obviously I can’t relate to this in any way, but I could imagine it could occur the longer I live

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

#158

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.

> Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used ...

That seems like it wouldn't work the way you're meaning in some pretty common cases. For example, with the Russian language.

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

#159
post #4

Presumably this is a big company problem of playing politics safely: They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag and furthermore don't want to acknowledge which country politics are even disputed and so don't support the rest.

> They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag Why not simply collect all the prevalent "stances" on the disputed topics, and give the user to choose on each stance individually (or for a better user experience: create some presets of "stances that often occur together", which the user can use to activate multiple stances at once).

Heh, hopefully browsers wouldn't be able to query the user answers to that info as it would be extremely fingerprint/identifying.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny you mentioned Mongolia. Republic of China (Taiwan) still recognize it as part of its territory (together with mainland China). It is the communist that ceded a lot of territory to the Soviet Union and the puppet state of Mongolia to appease the USSR by having a buffer between it and china

But that's mainly due to how the PRC operates, right?

Like when the PRC threatened invasion when the UK wanted Hong Kong to elect its own leaders, then later they can turn around and say "the British never even let the Hong Kong people vote".

Some with Taiwan / R.O.C and it's territorial claims.

Post reply on HN