5 ms·

I beleive that the unicode consortium have chosen not to say much about witch flags are there pretty much for this reason. They don't want unicode to get mixed

by erk__ 7y ago

I beleive that the unicode consortium have chosen not to say much about witch flags are there pretty much for this reason. They don't want unicode to get mixed in with international politics.

adt2bt 7y ago
There is no truly neutral position though. Who gets the final say then?
- loeg 7y ago
  Have you seen unicode? They usually err on the side of including everything, including, e.g., alphabets of fictional languages.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    Those fictional languages' mere existence isn't perceived as a threat by any government, though.
- CodesInChaos 7y ago
  Whoever renders the text. Since most applications delegate to the OS for that, it's typically the OS. The OS generally follows whatever the jurisdiction it's sold in requires. In theory an application could override it by doing custom rendering of these codepoints. The unicode standard doesn't care, as explained above, since it just defines an alphabet and takes no position in which country/locale codes are to be rendered with a flag.
derefr 7y ago
It goes beyond that; technically, there are no flags in Unicode. Instead, there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol — an symbol-alphabet where any pair of successive symbols from the alphabet are meant to be considered a ligature (so, a space of 36^2 = 1296 possible ligatures), where a subset of these ligatures are considered valid representations of a locale from the Unicode's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository. Unicode doesn't say that you should render these CLDR-valid locale meta-codepoints as flags, though. It just says they're locales. In other words, it's up to a given font to decide whether to draw these as flags, and which of them to draw as flags. With this move, they've abdicated the political determination over to, mostly, the OS manufacturers (since right now most OSes just have one OS emoji font that gets used for the graphical-pictograph-rendering process, rather than allowing user-installed emoji font-families.) Personally, I like this choice. No matter what any government says, Taiwan is its own locale—it has its own time zone, clock and currency display formats, etc. Locales are locales no matter who declares ownership over them. Having "locale icons" rather than geopolitical-region flags is probably the most stable arrangement we can have, even if it means that some OSes will just render a particular locale-icon as nothing.
- oldmanhorton 7y ago
  And for additional context, I believe every major OS vendor and many apps that bundle their own locale data have modifications on top of the stock CLDR database. Those modifications are mostly handled by legal teams, not by engineering.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  > Having "locale icons" rather than geopolitical-region flags is probably the most stable arrangement we can have Agreed. The only other way to draw locales would be to country outlines: which would most certainly open a Pandora's Box of socio political issues. What Apple has effectively done by invalidating the locale, is to remove the Taiwanese language. As an aside though: from a personal point of view there's quite a few emoji that I'd like to see hidden, such as the poop and middle finger. There's no need for such things, & yet this locale is removed? Weird politics.
  - FartyMcFarter 7y ago
    What do you have against feces and expressions of disgust/contempt?
    - cmroanirgo 7y ago
      I would rather use words to describe whether something is a contemptible pile of guano, and these cutsie images are reducing our ability to eloquently and accurately communicate. A well placed, terse word can have far more impact and meaning than the 4yr old speak that emoji bring us to. Your username is a perfect example: it's hilarious.
      - derefr 7y ago
        Unicode is a lot like a dictionary, in that both things exist to allow people to work with documents that already exist, whether the tool likes it or not. Dictionaries let you understand existing texts, by defining the words in them. Unicode preserves and faithfully transmits existing texts, by defining and fixing the meanings of the codels of those texts. Even if a dictionary didn't define a particular word, people would still use that word. You just wouldn't be able to find out what that word means from your dictionary. The word wouldn't be harmed; only the dictionary would be made less useful. Likewise, even without an assigned codepoint for an emoji, people would still create encodings of it—in chat programs and the like. They'd just be proprietary encodings that wouldn't be able to be copied-and-pasted to other software, and would likely suffer bit-rot. (Can any program that exists today—and that runs on a modern computer—correctly parse out the emoji-like symbols from the binary transcript files of a 90s IM program like AIM or ICQ?) The emoji symbols—at least at the time—wouldn't be harmed by this (people would still use them just as often); only Unicode's goal of "one universal text encoding" would be harmed.

by erk__ 7y ago

I beleive that the unicode consortium have chosen not to say much about witch flags are there pretty much for this reason. They don't want unicode to get mixed in with international politics.

adt2bt 7y ago

There is no truly neutral position though. Who gets the final say then?

loeg 7y ago
Have you seen unicode? They usually err on the side of including everything, including, e.g., alphabets of fictional languages.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Those fictional languages' mere existence isn't perceived as a threat by any government, though.
CodesInChaos 7y ago
Whoever renders the text. Since most applications delegate to the OS for that, it's typically the OS. The OS generally follows whatever the jurisdiction it's sold in requires. In theory an application could override it by doing custom rendering of these codepoints. The unicode standard doesn't care, as explained above, since it just defines an alphabet and takes no position in which country/locale codes are to be rendered with a flag.

derefr 7y ago

It goes beyond that; technically, there are no flags in Unicode. Instead, there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol — an symbol-alphabet where any pair of successive symbols from the alphabet are meant to be considered a ligature (so, a space of 36^2 = 1296 possible ligatures), where a subset of these ligatures are considered valid representations of a locale from the Unicode's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository. Unicode doesn't say that you should render these CLDR-valid locale meta-codepoints as flags, though. It just says they're locales. In other words, it's up to a given font to decide whether to draw these as flags, and which of them to draw as flags. With this move, they've abdicated the political determination over to, mostly, the OS manufacturers (since right now most OSes just have one OS emoji font that gets used for the graphical-pictograph-rendering process, rather than allowing user-installed emoji font-families.) Personally, I like this choice. No matter what any government says, Taiwan is its own locale—it has its own time zone, clock and currency display formats, etc. Locales are locales no matter who declares ownership over them. Having "locale icons" rather than geopolitical-region flags is probably the most stable arrangement we can have, even if it means that some OSes will just render a particular locale-icon as nothing.

oldmanhorton 7y ago
And for additional context, I believe every major OS vendor and many apps that bundle their own locale data have modifications on top of the stock CLDR database. Those modifications are mostly handled by legal teams, not by engineering.
cmroanirgo 7y ago
> Having "locale icons" rather than geopolitical-region flags is probably the most stable arrangement we can have Agreed. The only other way to draw locales would be to country outlines: which would most certainly open a Pandora's Box of socio political issues. What Apple has effectively done by invalidating the locale, is to remove the Taiwanese language. As an aside though: from a personal point of view there's quite a few emoji that I'd like to see hidden, such as the poop and middle finger. There's no need for such things, & yet this locale is removed? Weird politics.
- FartyMcFarter 7y ago
  What do you have against feces and expressions of disgust/contempt?
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    I would rather use words to describe whether something is a contemptible pile of guano, and these cutsie images are reducing our ability to eloquently and accurately communicate. A well placed, terse word can have far more impact and meaning than the 4yr old speak that emoji bring us to. Your username is a perfect example: it's hilarious.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Unicode is a lot like a dictionary, in that both things exist to allow people to work with documents that already exist, whether the tool likes it or not. Dictionaries let you understand existing texts, by defining the words in them. Unicode preserves and faithfully transmits existing texts, by defining and fixing the meanings of the codels of those texts. Even if a dictionary didn't define a particular word, people would still use that word. You just wouldn't be able to find out what that word means from your dictionary. The word wouldn't be harmed; only the dictionary would be made less useful. Likewise, even without an assigned codepoint for an emoji, people would still create encodings of it—in chat programs and the like. They'd just be proprietary encodings that wouldn't be able to be copied-and-pasted to other software, and would likely suffer bit-rot. (Can any program that exists today—and that runs on a modern computer—correctly parse out the emoji-like symbols from the binary transcript files of a 90s IM program like AIM or ICQ?) The emoji symbols—at least at the time—wouldn't be harmed by this (people would still use them just as often); only Unicode's goal of "one universal text encoding" would be harmed.