3 ms·

China really doesn't want to accept more flag emojis. For fairly obvious reasons.

by octoberfranklin 10mo ago

bawolff 10mo ago
I dont really think that makes sense as Taiwan flag is already there.
- gnabgib 10mo ago
  There are no country flags in UTF. The flag you're seeing is the interpretation of a 2 character ISO country code by your OS. > Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded. This allows the Unicode consortium to avoid any issues surrounding which countries to include (and, de facto, recognize), instead leaving it entirely to the system implementation as to which flags to include (see: partially recognized state). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
  - bawolff 10mo ago
    Sure. My point still stands, you can already encode Taiwan's flag, so what is China allegedly objecting to?
    - decimalenough 10mo ago
      There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other things about that entity), but Unicode doesn't offer any opinions on that.
      - throwaway290 10mo ago
        Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment.
        cluckindan 10mo ago
        Taiwan is the last vestige of original ”China” and PRC already redefined it when Taiwan (ROC) lost the mainland to the communists in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War.
        decimalenough 10mo ago
        Legally speaking, Taiwan is a province of China according to both the PRC and ROC. Of course, they both claim that they are the "China" in question.
        lern_too_spel 10mo ago
        While a previous government of Taiwan claimed that it was the legitimate ruler of China, the current government does not. It considers itself to be a separate sovereign state. The KMT that fought for control of China and fled the mainland is only a small fraction of Taiwan's population and only ruled over the majority by political suppression.
        throwaway290 10mo ago
        Not very wrong but maybe at least half of population will not agree with that
        adastra22 10mo ago
        This is a clear tell that your knowledge of the situation is basically just Wikipedia plus media reporting. Approximately nobody in Taiwan views it that way. It is an obscure legal fiction of no relevance. It only persists because of a red line drawn by the PRC. It’s kind of like how New Zealand is included as a province of Australia, technically, in their constitution.
sunaookami 10mo ago
[flagged]
dang 10mo ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- octoberfranklin 10mo ago
  This is a thread about flag emojis, hardly tangential! And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal with variable-length encodings and "grapheme cluster" nonsense just to keep one country happy. dang, you have impugned my honor. I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel! Nerf guns at twenty paces.
  - dang 10mo ago
    IMO veering from minutiae of 5-codepoint Unicode sequences to hot geopolitics ("for fairly obvious reasons") is a classic generic flamewar tangent, in the textbook sense of "tangent": there's one point in common and otherwise the lines don't intersect at all. These tangents always go in the same direction, too: they bump the thread off the back road (obscure Unicode details!) and onto the well-paved multi-line highway (to hell!). None of that matters though, if you're going to be as good-humored as this!

China really doesn't want to accept more flag emojis. For fairly obvious reasons.

bawolff 10mo ago

I dont really think that makes sense as Taiwan flag is already there.

gnabgib 10mo ago
There are no country flags in UTF. The flag you're seeing is the interpretation of a 2 character ISO country code by your OS. > Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded. This allows the Unicode consortium to avoid any issues surrounding which countries to include (and, de facto, recognize), instead leaving it entirely to the system implementation as to which flags to include (see: partially recognized state). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
- bawolff 10mo ago
  Sure. My point still stands, you can already encode Taiwan's flag, so what is China allegedly objecting to?
  - decimalenough 10mo ago
    There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other things about that entity), but Unicode doesn't offer any opinions on that.
    - throwaway290 10mo ago
      Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment.
      - cluckindan 10mo ago
        Taiwan is the last vestige of original ”China” and PRC already redefined it when Taiwan (ROC) lost the mainland to the communists in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War.
      - decimalenough 10mo ago
        Legally speaking, Taiwan is a province of China according to both the PRC and ROC. Of course, they both claim that they are the "China" in question.
        lern_too_spel 10mo ago
        While a previous government of Taiwan claimed that it was the legitimate ruler of China, the current government does not. It considers itself to be a separate sovereign state. The KMT that fought for control of China and fled the mainland is only a small fraction of Taiwan's population and only ruled over the majority by political suppression.
        throwaway290 10mo ago
        Not very wrong but maybe at least half of population will not agree with that
        adastra22 10mo ago
        This is a clear tell that your knowledge of the situation is basically just Wikipedia plus media reporting. Approximately nobody in Taiwan views it that way. It is an obscure legal fiction of no relevance. It only persists because of a red line drawn by the PRC. It’s kind of like how New Zealand is included as a province of Australia, technically, in their constitution.

sunaookami 10mo ago

[flagged]

dang 10mo ago

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

octoberfranklin 10mo ago
This is a thread about flag emojis, hardly tangential! And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal with variable-length encodings and "grapheme cluster" nonsense just to keep one country happy. dang, you have impugned my honor. I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel! Nerf guns at twenty paces.
- dang 10mo ago
  IMO veering from minutiae of 5-codepoint Unicode sequences to hot geopolitics ("for fairly obvious reasons") is a classic generic flamewar tangent, in the textbook sense of "tangent": there's one point in common and otherwise the lines don't intersect at all. These tangents always go in the same direction, too: they bump the thread off the back road (obscure Unicode details!) and onto the well-paved multi-line highway (to hell!). None of that matters though, if you're going to be as good-humored as this!