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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

#241

Post by owlninja »

riffraff wrote: post #197
neuronexmachina wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mostly started with geolocation-dependent names in the early 2010s, e.g. Kashmir and Palestine.

that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.

I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?

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

#242

Post by wongarsu »

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's mission is to be able to represent all written text. Once you decide that flags should be part of that you kind of have to include all of them. Including a flag in Unicode isn't a statement that you believe that this country exists, it's a statement that you think there are people who use this flag in written communication.

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

#243

Post by dewey »

croisillon wrote: post #216
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…

i wish there was a unicode version of that thing 文A Wikipedia does for language switch

I always find that very confusing, every time I see that in the mobile app (where it's featured pretty prominently) I'm still searching where I can see the other language version before I realize that's the symbol for it.

I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.

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

#244

Post by notpushkin »

vintagedave wrote: post #225

> although you’ll still be on the hook for downloading the entire 1.4MB font file I haven't tested with emojis (never thought of it, great test case!) but try Fontimize, which creates font subsets based on text your site actually uses. It runs over the HTML and CSS and creates an applicable subset. But the Python API supports passing just some specific text. Try using that, passing any and every flag you wish. You sh…

That was my first thought, too! The article actually links to a polyfill which uses a subset font. Here’s the subsetting script it uses: https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/m...

Looks like the flags-only font is just 77 kb!

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

#245

Post by graypegg »

dewey wrote: post #243
croisillon wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish there was a unicode version of that thing 文A Wikipedia does for language switch

I always find that very confusing, every time I see that in the mobile app (where it's featured pretty prominently) I'm still searching where I can see the other language version before I realize that's the symbol for it. I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.

I do feel like it's made slightly more clear if it's stylized like

    文A
Sorry for the poor attempt at ascii art. But I've seen some arrow indicating swapping/matching between the two characters. And the choice of characters does cover a huge swath of people on earth. (文 for zh_* + jp, and A for every latin, cyrillic and greek alphabet language) Of course that's still missing a huge chunk of people concerned that it might just swap between two languages not including theirs, but as a universal symbol for "translation" it's probably a good bet that the reader recognizes them as "being related to languages" at minimum since they have most certainly interacted with one of those language groups before.

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

#246

Post by walthamstow »

Longhanks wrote: post #230
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…

Also, transgender is not a country. The flags don't necessarily represent countries.

Nor is England, if we're being honest with ourselves

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

#247

Post by profmonocle »

GuB-42 wrote: post #239
echoangle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome launched their own root program a couple years ago: https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrom...

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

#248

Post by zamadatix »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #198
pkasting wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1.4MB binary size cost is massive. I'm a chrome developer and our threshold for what you need to explain the cost/benefit of is 16KB. To me this just isn't worth the cost.

Sorry, but a Chrome developer complaining about 1.4MB being too "massive" is just the funniest thing ever! xD

The entire offline installer of over 15 years worth of features is 120 MB for Windows, it's quite impressive really considering the amount of features that includes. If they took the typical approach of web pages run in Chrome that might be multiple GB by now.

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

#249

Post by Tomte »

wongarsu wrote: post #240
eviks wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy

As opposed to a country, which needs an airline and a beer: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/

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

#250

Post by RunningDroid »

graypegg wrote: post #245
dewey wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find that very confusing, every time I see that in the mobile app (where it's featured pretty prominently) I'm still searching where I can see the other language version before I realize that's the symbol for it. I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.

I do feel like it's made slightly more clear if it's stylized like 文 A Sorry for the poor attempt at ascii art. But I've seen some arrow indicating swapping/matching between the two characters. And the choice of characters does cover a huge swath of people on earth. (文 for zh_* + jp, and A for every latin, cyrillic and greek alphabet language) Of course that's still missing a huge chunk of people concerned that it mi…

  文↔A
Unicodified version, some fonts don't render it nice though

Screenshot in case HN strips the Unicode: https://i.imgur.com/yeLxyOe.jpeg

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