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Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

geyer.dev

251–260 of 328 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Haha thanks! I was thinking HN would remove it like it does with emoji, good to know the arrows codepage works!

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Some of the target countries have laws on the books with teeth regarding their individual disputes.

India is one of them.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest Documenting reality doesn't endorse what happened. Istanbul was Constantinople. Shit happens. If I'm travelling, I'd much rather the flags and borders reflect the situation on the ground instead of making meaningless humanitarian gestures.

> Documenting reality The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries. You can come up with some arbitrary criteria to split the difference, but your reality would break when you effectively set foot in a spot that works under the competing assumption.

The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.

No, in a disputed territory there's one reality, and 1..n delusions.

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

#255
post #163
post #58

> Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT. It was useless as usual. This is so real.

I hold the belief that if you ask it something that nobody has documented before it just won't do it. This also and particularly applies to code. Ask about Fibonacci? Great. Ask about something tricky? Let's make up some APIs

Worse, the statistically frequent fibonacci-type problems are attractors in the latest space. If you ever get near them then snap, they'll degrade whatever answer you get that's not actually related, and it'll start throwing in fibonacci concepts into your non-fibonacci code.

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

#256

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…

> It’s like if the US south had a language common there: what icon would you use?

Having grown up in the South, the Stars and Bars would be a depressingly popular choice.

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

#257
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 Sym…

I can blame Microsoft. Every other tech company and OS figured out how to make it work and they're not exactly buckling under the weight of legal or political pressure on the matter of flags.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not trying to be funny or anything, but you just typed the 文A thing! With some CSS you can make it indistinguishable from an icon

no, that's a good point but it would need some recognition, a name etc

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

#259
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.

Regardless of what the upstream rebuttal is (i.e., Unicode's mission as you explained), I think it makes sense for the downstream entity (i.e., Windows) to simply indicate inheritance from upstream as a rebuttal to any pressure.

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

#260
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 Sym…

It's a bit confusing that folks who consider Taiwan a province and not a country wouldn't take issue (or at least see it as a minor issue relative to the presence of a flag) with it being included among ISO country codes. In other words, if Microsoft were to be walking on eggshells enough to omit flags wholesale, I'm surprised they don't also omit all things that enumerate ISO country codes.

I see your point that flags elicit a different reaction out of people than territorial classifications, but simultaneously it seems to be the classification which elicits disagreement. "You can call it a country so long as you don't assign a flag" seems like the wrong place to draw a line in the sand.

Presumably, provinces can have flags!!

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