3 ms·

And depends on the location. For example, the characters U+1F1FA U+1F1F8 are the regional indicators "U" and "S", and are rendered as . These are two separate

And depends on the location. For example, the characters U+1F1FA U+1F1F8 are the regional indicators "U" and "S", and are rendered as . These are two separate codepoints that may together be displayed as a United States flag. Similarly, the regional indicators "T" and "W" are rendered as and "H" and "K" are rendered as . On my system, this is rendered as the flag of Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively. Depending on where you live, these regional indicators might not be rendered as flags. Edit: Looks like HN stripped out the character codes. The effect can be reproduced by copy-pasting the symbols from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol

WorldMaker 4y ago
> Depending on where you live, these regional indicators might not be rendered as flags. This is also why Microsoft-vended emoji fonts don't include flags/"regional indicators" support at all. On a Windows machine you just see the letters US or TW in an ugly boxed type and nothing like a flag. The interesting background story goes: everyone remembers that Windows 95 had that fancy graphical Time Zone selector that looked real pretty in screenshots (but wasn't actually the best way to select time zones anyway). The reasons Microsoft removed that tool are less well known and almost entirely geopolitical: time zone borders often correspond to country borders and several countries got mad at their border looking wrong and sued Microsoft for "lying" about their borders. After a bunch of micro-changes to the graphics of that widget and then a lot of money spent on lawsuits and geopolitical fights, Microsoft eventually just entirely removed the widget because it was a "nice-to-have" and never actually necessary. It is said that from that fight Microsoft decided that it never wanted to be involved in that sort of geopolitics ever again, and flags are nothing if not geopolitical symbols, so Microsoft's emoji fonts don't encode hardly any flags at all. (In exchange they encode a lot of fun "cats with jobs" that other font vendors still don't. I find that a fun trade-off myself.)

WorldMaker 4y ago

> Depending on where you live, these regional indicators might not be rendered as flags. This is also why Microsoft-vended emoji fonts don't include flags/"regional indicators" support at all. On a Windows machine you just see the letters US or TW in an ugly boxed type and nothing like a flag. The interesting background story goes: everyone remembers that Windows 95 had that fancy graphical Time Zone selector that looked real pretty in screenshots (but wasn't actually the best way to select time zones anyway). The reasons Microsoft removed that tool are less well known and almost entirely geopolitical: time zone borders often correspond to country borders and several countries got mad at their border looking wrong and sued Microsoft for "lying" about their borders. After a bunch of micro-changes to the graphics of that widget and then a lot of money spent on lawsuits and geopolitical fights, Microsoft eventually just entirely removed the widget because it was a "nice-to-have" and never actually necessary. It is said that from that fight Microsoft decided that it never wanted to be involved in that sort of geopolitics ever again, and flags are nothing if not geopolitical symbols, so Microsoft's emoji fonts don't encode hardly any flags at all. (In exchange they encode a lot of fun "cats with jobs" that other font vendors still don't. I find that a fun trade-off myself.)