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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

#231

Post by WorldMaker »

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…

> Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer.

Flags are Political Symbols. ISO Country Codes are not. People rally around flags. Flag color symbolize beliefs/ideals. Flag crests and images contain political messages. ISO Country Codes are just a couple of letters that might (but not necessarily do) reflect a Country Name.

It's generally not just "don't want the country acknowledged", it's "don't want dissidents rallying to that flag". For instance, the parts of China that believe Taiwan is and always shall be a part of China don't have a problem with naming Taiwan as such, they see that as the "province name"; they do have a problem with the national flag of Taiwan, which intentionally represents and symbolizes its independence from China.

I can't blame Microsoft for not wanting to support flags. Politics are hard. Flags can be the hard mode of Political Symbols.

(Also Microsoft's stance is interesting in the way that it came from that Windows 95-era map-based Time Zone picker. The number of lawsuits they had over effectively "single pixel" border disputes was absurd. Flags are way more political than borders.)

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

scrollaway wrote: post #91
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short of web standardization, how should a language picker be designed for a website where presumably the main design goal is a non-default-language speaking user can pick out their language?

You can use the iso code of the language itself as an abbreviation, with the name of the language in that target language next to it. The iso code is OK to use if you need a short “icon” for the language. There is a few standard icons representing “Translation” if you need iconography for the idea of a language switcher, too. EN - English FR - Français RU - Русский

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by Dylan16807 »

scrollaway wrote: post #192
Dylan16807 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a useless way to rebut their specific argument. Not a single reason in your post. You could talk about your experience, but you're not doing that. And the claims they made about how much they care were not extreme. "Putting their money where their keyboard is" could be accomplished with $10. Would $10 make you happy or settle anything at all?

My experience? My experience is you have a lot of people who claim to care about Ukraine, but then go on to say things such as “they should just give up the land”. The above conversation is a good example of this. Ukrainian people are very patriotic especially now, and flags are a highly symbolic and meaningful subject. And not wanting to listen to “just don’t use a flag for languages”, which is a ridiculously simple…

> My experience?

Your experience with flag use.

Your experience with people claiming to care about Ukraine isn't relevant because the above user only claimed that they care about it significantly more than a thing they don't care about. That's a super weak claim.

You're twisting it into a major claim so you can put them down for failing to live up to your standards of caring, when it was only a relative comparison.

> GP has no idea what it’s like

Which you are not trying to remedy. You are only trying to prove they don't care enough, as if that's going to somehow prove their original claim about flag use incorrect.

> I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate

Instead of? Does that mean no explanation even if you get them to donate?

> those who don’t listen to the simplest ask

Simple doesn't mean correct. Both sides of this argument are simple.

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

#235

Post by echoangle »

GuB-42 wrote: post #112
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.

By that argument, they shouldn't override the OS trust store either, but most browsers do. There's a compromise between consistency and user friendliness.

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

#236

Post by jamager »

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #37
Alex-Programs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I develop a language learning tool that uses flags for languages extensively. I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one. For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficul…

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…

However, the mapping normally is from language to flag, not the other way around.

German -> Germany, French -> France, Swedish -> Sweden.

It's not perfect, but 99% of times it communicates what is meant to communicate, which is more than what you can say of many icons.

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

#237

Post by culi »

est wrote: post #217
culi wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The top 7 most spoken languages in India are in the top 30 worldwide. And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)

sorry but there's no "Cantonese text", both Cantonese and Mandarin are written in Chinese. It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. (yes I am aware hk people chose to write 粤语白字 in a particular way, because the orthography movement failed in the 70s)

Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages

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

#238

Post by agos »

eviks wrote: post #186
psychoslave wrote: post #70

The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one official language and many languages are official language of more than one country. Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green f…

Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?

no, and they don't need to. a list is fine, you can include the name of the language (localized), a specifier if there are variants of the language, and even the language name and variant localized in itself. Sure, "Español (República Dominicana) - Spanish (Dominican Republic)" might be a bit long but it's still way easier fitting it into a picker than trying to come up with an icon for it.

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

#239

Post by GuB-42 »

echoangle wrote: post #235
GuB-42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that argument, they shouldn't override the OS trust store either, but most browsers do. There's a compromise between consistency and user friendliness.

Chrome doesn't override the OS trust store, Firefox does.

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

#240

Post by wongarsu »

eviks wrote: post #191
Doxin wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think such a system does or can exist. e.g. nl-NL is distinct from nl-BE which is distinct from fr-BE. Using a country flag doesn't work if a country uses multiple languages. Languages themselves don't have icons to go with them like countries do, but even if they did it wouldn't distinguish between the same language spoken in different countries, which can matter a lot for how things get localized. nl-NL use…

You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well. (and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)

As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries.

Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.

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