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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

#291

Post by Someone »

wongarsu wrote: post #242
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.

> 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.

Unicode has decided flags shouldn’t be part of Unicode.

There are a few flag emoji that got included before they reached that decision and there are “regional indicator symbols” that often get displayed as flags, but that’s it. They won’t, for example, include flags of cantons of Liechtenstein.

See https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag....

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

#292

Post by pwdisswordfishz »

walthamstow wrote: post #246
Longhanks wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

What is England, then?

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

#294

Post by nottorp »

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…

Does a dropdown with flag emojis support searching from the keyboard?

It's really annoying when they give you a loong list of countries or languages and you have to scroll through it until you get two pages past the target, then scroll back slowly until you get to one page before the target, repeat until you finally have it in sight...

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

#295

Post by nottorp »

Someone wrote: post #291
wongarsu wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Unicode has decided flags shouldn’t be part of Unicode. There are a few flag emoji that got included before they reached that decision and there are “regional indicator symbols” that often get displayed as flags, but that’s it. They won’t, for example, include fla…

That would be actual work. Instead they justify their existence by adding more poop emojis in various shades of brown and yellow...

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

#296

Post by nottorp »

1f60c wrote: post #261
Jotalea wrote: post #58

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

Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility. Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.

> Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility.

Not everyone has the time or the inclination to keep a stable of local llms (and update them regularly, for example). Some people have other hobbies.

> Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.

What? It's been years since a regular search got you anything but spam from the usual tutorial farms.

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

#297

Post by nottorp »

SllX wrote: post #223
immibis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW the USA is now one of these "sensitive countries" where apps have to lie to legally do business. Just like Chinese users see Taiwan labeled as China, American users see (or will soon see) the Gulf of Mexico labeled as the Gulf of America.

Two things: 1) Don’t lie. Apps don’t have to “lie” to do business in America. If someone labels the Gulf as the “Gulf of Mexico”, there’s not really a goddamn thing the Federal Government can do about it except throw a shit fit. The fullest extent that they can enforce this is on contractors making products and services specifically for the Federal Government’s and Military’s own use. 2) Maps apps are probably going…

So it's only bad when the Chinese or Russians do it? :)

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

#298

Post by lmm »

int_19h wrote: post #276
lmm wrote: 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?

Given the context though we don't need to look at all possible hypothetical flags, only those that Unicode recognizes: https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt This list notably doesn't have Quebec, Northern Ireland, or Somaliland. But it does have Taiwan and Palestinian Territories.

Huh. Including England/Scotland/Wales but not Northern Ireland feels extremely arbitrary, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if it ran afoul of some kind of discrimination law in the UK.

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

#299

Post by demetrius »

My biggest problem with flag emojis is that flags change, so the meaning of text encoded with Unicode changes.

During the 2020 protests, Telegram changed large¹ BY emoji to the national white-red-white flag. Then it reverted the large emoji back to Łukašenka’s red-green flag. So, old conversations no longer have the same flag.

These flags don't have the same meaning! They represent two very different visions of Belarus.

I would really prefer if Unicode encoded flags with date of their acceptance. E.g. BY-1991 or BY-1918 for white-red-white, BY-1995 for red-green flag.

_____________

¹ Small emoji retained red-green flag even at that time.

Also, Telegram has an option to replace large emoji with small emoji, so it was totally possible to send white-red-white flag and have it received as red-green flag, and vice versa.

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

#300

Post by demetrius »

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)

> It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode.

Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak.

Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak.

> because the orthography movement failed in the 70s

It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”.

For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading.

They're just different words¹.

____

¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.

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