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Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

geyer.dev

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

#21

Post by the_other »

Y_Y wrote: post #17
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.

But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I…

Nice. Even Japan (jp) and Japanese (ja) lose out with this.

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

#22

Post by jagged-chisel »

slig wrote: post #16

Why are emojis tied to a OS font? The only reason I can think of is another way to force people to upgrade their OS, for instance, on macOS, even if your version was still supported, you wouldn't get the new emojis until you upgraded.

…or install a font with support

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

#23

Post by TonyTrapp »

danjl wrote: post #20

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

If the font contains the missing emojis, sure. Emoji fonts tend to be huge though. The base Roboto font doesn't contain the emojis IIRC, there's a separate Roboto Emoji font for this reason (it's several dozen MBs).

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

#24

Post by cdrini »

slig wrote: post #16

Why are emojis tied to a OS font? The only reason I can think of is another way to force people to upgrade their OS, for instance, on macOS, even if your version was still supported, you wouldn't get the new emojis until you upgraded.

Hmm I'm a bit confused by your question. Emojis are a Unicode range, and the only way Unicode is displayed on a monitor is through -- a font. So just like with text, if a website doesn't load it's own font, the OS-level fonts are used. I'm not sure what the alternative would be.

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

#25

Post by david_allison »

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.

https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-r...

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

#26

Post by toolslive »

Y_Y wrote: post #17
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.

But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I…

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 ;)

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

#27

Post by aleph_minus_one »

B-Con wrote: 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).

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

#28

Post by scrollaway »

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.

One of my favourite newly discovered YouTubers, K Klein, talks a lot about language.

What sold me to subscribe to his channel is this absolutely wonderful bit with flags at 4:30:

https://youtu.be/iQNdkdqoIdw?t=4m29s

Flags aren’t languages. Listen to your elders.

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

#29

Post by stevage »

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.

Yeah, but there is definitely no better option.

If I come across a site that is not in English, but I see a little flag somewhere, that is a very good indicator that that's the place I can go and change the language to English.

(Happens a lot more when you're travelling in a non-English-speaking country.)

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

#30

Post by scrollaway »

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.
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