Why are emojis tied to a OS font? The only reason I can think of is another way to force people to upgrade their OS, for instance, on macOS, even if your version was still supported, you wouldn't get the new emojis until you upgraded.

It is definitely a strategy for Apple to increase uptake of their non x.0 releases.

But this just means that numerous websites are going to offer different versions of that same 1.4Mb download to make it work for themselves.

Sorry, but a Chrome developer complaining about 1.4MB being too "massive" is just the funniest thing ever! xD

Noto Color Emoji weighs more than 20 MB, which makes it difficult to embed to the browser. I think that's mainly due to the embedded PNGs so it would be technically possible to get rid of them and use vector fonts for special occasions, though. (In fact, I believe Firefox did so with its built-in Twemoji.)

Firefox has an custom cert management.

Chrome relies on the os certs.

I think that's the correct way how software should works.

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?

Chinese denialism over Taiwan is really, really demented. It's not that they just claim Taiwan - they pretend they already own it, and stick their fingers in their ears if you point out facts on the ground.

I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.

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

I don't think the UN really defines borders, its more what other countries recognize and various international law rules. At most the un security counil can declare a defacto change in border should not be recognized (usually to ensure that an act of agression isnt rewarded with territory) but its actually super rare for them to do that and they have only done it a few times

What is England, then?

In this case, Microsoft also isn't saying "this is an ISO country code", it's just outputting the letters embedded in the ZWJ sequence as worst case fallback letters in an intentionally ugly fallback font block. Those letters come from ISO country codes in working flag emoji, but Microsoft's approach is "dumb passthrough", Microsoft isn't making any political decisions or validating the ISO country codes are actually ISO country codes or anything, it's just outputting "raw data" from the emoji contents itself.

Windows also doesn't have an "ISO Country Code Picker" here. They don't provide tools to make flag emoji at all.

Chrome doesn't override the OS trust store, Firefox does.

I'm not GP, but yes, IMO browsers shouldn't override the OS trust store (and shouldn't ship their own flag emojis).

You are a web browser, not an operating system. Stay in your lane.

The entire offline installer of over 15 years worth of features is 120 MB for Windows, it's quite impressive really considering the amount of features that includes. If they took the typical approach of web pages run in Chrome that might be multiple GB by now.

google.com homepage

  59 requests 1.2 MB transferred 3.1 MB resources

No, it's not only not easy, it's impossible to fit into your tray icon

But that's mainly due to how the PRC operates, right?

Like when the PRC threatened invasion when the UK wanted Hong Kong to elect its own leaders, then later they can turn around and say "the British never even let the Hong Kong people vote".

Some with Taiwan / R.O.C and it's territorial claims.

India is one of them.

It's a bit ironic that this page doesn't include a usage of the icon or any localization at all.

Yeah, that looks...fine...but I think it would still take me longer to find than a Russian flag or whatever.

I welcome the day I can identify my home as a territory and have it legally recognized.

Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?

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 might just swap between two languages not including theirs, but as a universal symbol for "translation" it's probably a good bet that the reader recognizes them as "being related to languages" at minimum since they have most certainly interacted with one of those language groups before.

  文↔A

Interesting. That's a lot more plausible. Reopened the bug.

Wait really? Are you saying this Google search[0] returns no useful results at all?

The prompt I used isn't a particularly good search query, and I got:

  * A Stack Overflow question about this issue with a proposed solution;
  * A Reddit thread offering a workaround to non-technical users;
  * This thread on HN (which OP of course couldn't have seen, but anyway);
  * OP's article;
  * A blog post about OP's article;
  * A blog post with an elegant solution using pyftsubset

What am I missing?

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Why+would+flag+emojis+render...

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

They eventually did remove part of the map: because of politics and timing, Poland was accidentally removed despite the map time zone picker no longer working, because the dedicated Polish timezone the green pixels were attached to were removed.

Almost nothing, it scrolls horizontally to show the selected time zone in the middle.

Those flag glyphs still have to be harmonized with other emoji glyphs anyway, so including all of them is the safest approach.

Oh man, international corporations forcing me into the translation of their website is a huge pet peeve of mine, as the translation is usually poor.

Just let me choose ‘Netherlands - English’ and I’ll be on my way, please and thanks.

Are you seriously arguing against the use of ideograms? User interfaces without them would be unusable.

There’s really not.

I frequently travel in places where I don’t speak the primary language — and having to hunt down a menu in a language I can’t read sounds a lot worse than having a flag I know visible on the main page.

Why did you use letters to send your reply? Letters are a symbolic representation of language, but they are imprecise. I don't know the prosody of your utterance, what tone you used, what accent you're speaking, etc. This is unacceptable and I am very offended. /s

Symbols are useful. You can quibble over the symbols chosen (they don't seem to do a lot of physical weighing in courts?), but that is fundamentally besides the point, which is 'how do I convey this widely understood concept in a limited amount of space?'.

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.

That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?

If you had the choice between "no lawsuits at all" and "lawsuits in random months by random countries for things that can escalate to violence and wars" you wouldn't take "no lawsuits at all"?

Even if very few of the lawsuits actually escalate to violence or war, is any risk of violence/war worth it? Ethics would suggest "all my competitors are doing it" isn't a great answer here, either, and certainly doesn't remove the risk.

I can respect the "no lawsuits at all" preference here.

> 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.

Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages

You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well.

(and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)

Your question was

> can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?

I gave one (of many) examples where this would be relevant for a country other than China. If you don't think South Korea is politically important enough to matter, then use the Israel/Palestinian flag situation as something that certainly is.

Or more simply: no, this is not just because of China and Taiwan.

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 to relabel it as the Gulf of America anyway within America, and it’s not exactly a lie. Barring any issue with Congress, if there’s some statute buried somewhere that legally enforces the name of the Gulf to be the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t exactly a lie if the President exercising the authority of the Office of the President renames a geographical feature that’s at least partly touched by the US. There’s a lot of geographical features that have different names either in different languages, different locales or both, and it’s fully within the Executive branch’s purview to name them. They do so all the time, although typically for the more obscure things nowadays since for anything too prominent, the name was decided long ago.

Maps apps can set their own policy on this, but generally the easiest course of action is to defer to governing authorities.

Obviously no, 26² makes 676, and number of languages in the world is estimated to be around 4000 and 8000. Given that 26³ is 17576, you would probably start to have something vast enough with scheme like ab-cd-ef.

The example given is de-CH and lb-LU - a counterexample for the neat scheme would require separate dialects of the same language within a single country e.g. 近畿方言.

I find it entirely plausible that it's about Palestine (in the sense that that would be sufficient cause for MS to want to avoid shipping a list of countries even if there wasn't a China/Taiwan issue) given that e.g. several US states have laws that make companies ineligible for public contracts if they participate in boycotting Israel. To say nothing of wanting to make sales in Israel itself.

(Of course it won't really be about any one thing, it will be about all of these things - and China is probably the biggest and most relevant case. But it's by no means the only one)

You can use the iso code of the language itself as an abbreviation, with the name of the language in that target language next to it. The iso code is OK to use if you need a short “icon” for the language. There is a few standard icons representing “Translation” if you need iconography for the idea of a language switcher, too.

   EN - English
   FR - Français
   RU - Русский

The ban on "display" of the DPRK flag means flying the flag in public or on a building, it doesn't mean viewing the file on a computer.

I see that posturing over a stretch of water can easily lead to denying a group of people the right of self-determination.

fact: 99% of people are dumber than the top 1%: so, "If everyone else understands your comment a different way" it precisely matches the case that they're all stupid-er than the 1%.

And that's how you construct an argument.

Thanks for the explanation. The translation icon is one of those things I didn't realize I was already familiar with.

Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway? Crimea is a different story, as many countries recognize it to be in some kind of limbo and treat it as neither Russian nor Ukrainian.

I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis.

Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).

Well... that kind of makes sense no? What do you think it should say?

There are very few countries with multiple equally-influential languages that don't have better alternatives for flags.

It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags.

Countries may have ambiguous languages, but _languages very rarely have ambiguous countries_. Sure, there are Finnish speakers in Sweden, but the Swedish flag remains a clear indicator of the Swedish language.

Hindi and India is the main exception to this. Arabic is also difficult, though Egypt seems to have a slight edge by convention.

> UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades

I sympathise, and if they have any better ideas than a textual list that users need to read through rather than quickly scan (not very good UX...), I'd love to hear them. From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?

> E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English.

Switzerland seems pretty easy -- French, German and Italian get the obvious flags, while Romansh gets either the Swiss flag or the Grisons flag. No?

> Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.

So it kind of seems to me like they've lost. They might be banging the drum, but in the real world the flags are useful.

That's fine for Switzerland. And I get the India case.

But why does it have to concern some Finnish online store that also has English and Swedish as options? Do their actual users really care? Because that is the litmus test, not the opinion of someone writing a blog.

Are you claiming French- or German-speaking Swiss users don't know that they speak French or German?

Or are you claiming that they don't know what the French or German flags look like?

> e.g. movie subtitles

As I said, only ppl from HK insist doing this. And I have zero problem with that. But I have yet to see any formal text or software UIs writing in this style.

> It's not like you can compare what the person was saying and what the person ended up writing.

That the point I was trying to make. The Chinese "text" unification was done two millennials ago, but people "speak" differently of every individual "character", as dialects or mutually unintelligible or whatever.

I'd argue Chinese characters don't actually represent a sound, there isn't any alphabet in Chinese, you are doing it wrong to find every pronouciation a Chinese character. It's an ideogram system afterall.

When a Chinese person 睇 a large chunk of text (e.g. not HK subtitles), they parse the symbols visually and link to the meaning directly.

When a chinese person think of something, they don't do a subvocal monologue inside their head, they just recall the "shape" of the characters and combine the reasoning in lines of "symbols". Like when you do math you use a "formula" in your head, not the English vocal description of a formula.

Go back to the topic of this thread, when a Chinese person 睇 some software UI, they link the "text" directly to their function, they don't think twice of the "pronouciation".

Interestingly, if a person reads a "character" completely wrong, he/she may never realize until some awkward moment happens during a speech or a conversation. But the meaning of the word/character was 100% correct anyway. You can ask the question "have you read something characters wrong in your childhood and only found out much later" to any Chinese. It happens a lot

N.B. I've confused 誰 and 唯 in my footnote. (I can no longer edit my message to fix it.)

> As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery.

As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen.

> Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words.

The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?

Just wait because all official EU sites now use the Irish flag to represent English, and it's getting more common in other websites made in Europe.

As an Irish person I can't help feeling a frisson of satisfaction.

But as a developer, this is just asking for confusion, especially since the Irish flag is already confusing enough.

I mean, we could have a beautiful white harp on a green background representing Irish culture. The Welsh got a dragon...

But no, it's a political statement from 120 years ago represented in three boring vertical stripes, just like everyone else's flag. It's identical (ok, mirrored) to the Ivory cost flag. It's the same three colors as the India flag, rotated 90 degrees, which itself is very similar to the Niger flag. And if you squint, or just don't know your flags well, it could easily be the Italian flag. It's a terrible choice to represent a language.

> Is it the british flag?

obviously the British flag is for the least controversial option, Ulster Scots.

that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.

But they should see what their home country calls it? I am totally against this, but don't really think Google is bending the knee or hard-coding a name here.

I don't think Google is required to change anything, since it's not a government agency.

No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.

That's not the only issue. India has over 1,600 native languages and 22 "official" ones. Which language would a country like that represent?

What about colonial nations like the US or most of South America. Do the native languages not get a symbol because a colonial history resulted in a foreign language being the dominant one?

Sorry for the shameless plug, but I already made a reusable React component for that in case anybody needs it for their business:

Npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-lang-selecta Source code: https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta

As a Surinamese Dutch person, I fail to see any issues with this approach. ;)

Joking aside, I have heard of people deliberately doing a sort of inverse version of this. For example, if you live in Barcelona then Ubuntu's installer will detect you as being in Madrid's timezones and wanted to use Spain Spanish locale. If you insist that you're in Andorra you get an equivalent timezone and the Catalan locale (which is the preference for a lot of people, despite the bizarre way of reporting time).

    - I want proper English,
    - and Proper SI units, 
    - and Euro as currency. 

India is definitely a difficult one. I'm using it to represent Hindi, and that's the one that makes me the most uncomfortable, because there are so many languages. I think the intent is reasonably clear, but if all countries were that ambigious, I'd avoid flags.

Nuenki supports European Spanish (though now you mention it, I ought to make that clearer). If it were American Spanish, I'd probably use Mexico. I handle Portuguese that way.

Switzerland is easy, because I have no need to include their flag. German is covered by Germany (yes, I know of Austria), French by France, etc.

And I'm highly unlikely to add Romansh, if only because it'd be very difficult to translate with good quality. I would if I could though, I find it fascinating. For a flag, I'd find an online Romansh community and ask what flag people would find most respectful + representative, or if people would prefer I forgo it.

You argue that it's misleading. I see where you're coming from. It isn't perfectly explicit and unambiguous. However, I don't think it's misleading in practice.

Nobody looks at a Spanish flag and thinks it's denoting Catalan - I'd probably use a regional flag there - nor do people look at a Union Jack or an American flag and go "no idea what that's for". When looking to see if Nuenki supports Finnish, nobody looks for the Swedish flag. They look for the Finnish flag.

People know what the stereotypical flags are, particularly when they're learning that language.

So imo it's about absolute precision vs UX, and the UX of reading through a textual list of languages is awful. It's a complete pain to scan through without any kind of visual indicator. That's why, in practice, everyone uses flags.

I didn't previously use flags so widely. Adding them everywhere (e.g. the dropdowns on the demo) was a result of feedback from people who felt it would make it nicer to use. Also, they're generally alongside the full name (aside from the aforementioned cloud), to clear up any ambiguity.

> 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/wiki/States_and_union_territories_o...

Very similar to the world situation.

I don't think anybody claims that it is not a flawed idea. From what I understand from this thread, people who use flags to represent languages fully acknowledge that it is a flawed idea - the problem is that they lack an alternative solution in some contexts (for example, those that require high information density).

However, the mapping normally is from language to flag, not the other way around.

German -> Germany, French -> France, Swedish -> Sweden.

It's not perfect, but 99% of times it communicates what is meant to communicate, which is more than what you can say of many icons.

In your experience, what's the better option for an iconographic representation?

Give me one example of a website that supports, let's say, three of the 20+ Indian languages, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Swiss French, Swiss German, Swiss Italian, and Romansh.

You will have a hard time, even on Wikipedia.

For most people, flags absolutely are the best shorthand for the language of the same name.

If someone see's the spanish flag on a language learning site, they're going to know it's spanish. No one looks at that and think, "hmm, no, I don't want to learn basque."

It may be technically correct, but it's pretty obvious to people what it means. It's extremely common.

If somebody said to me, “I speak American”, I would infer that they meant the American dialect of the English language. If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic. Similarly, if I saw a Welsh flag on a language selection UI, I would assume that it represented the Welsh Brythonic language even though most Welsh people speak English.

Unicode makes this hard (though it does provide the Welsh flag) but in principle you could solve this for some minority languages. For instance if you wanted to support Catalan, just use the flag of Catalonia, since they have one. You don’t need to have a country to have a flag, and you don’t need to have a country for your flag to become part of Unicode. Unicode has the transgender flag for instance. For Balinese maybe I would just use the flag of Bali.

> 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.

Swiss french is not as much of a distinct variation, rather a dialect very similar to Belgian french.

I am already aware of that, but stating that here does not contradict what I said, neither that line specifically nor that line within the full context of my comment. Indian software written by Indians for the Indian market might be different though, but I'll defer to any Indians that want to chime in on that subject themselves.

Okay. But do you think the line you quoted is incorrect?

I work in Brussels with a lot of Ukrainians — both fighters and refugees. I’ve made this a part of my day to day life since the full scale invasion. We until recently even shared an office with the Ukrainian Voices refugee committee, in fact.

Seeing as you say you care about getting services to those people, let’s talk about putting your money where your keyboard is. Reach out via my profile and let me know how much you’d like to contribute.

Guess the Crimean Tatar speakers just get screwed?

> My experience?

Your experience with flag use.

Your experience with people claiming to care about Ukraine isn't relevant because the above user only claimed that they care about it significantly more than a thing they don't care about. That's a super weak claim.

You're twisting it into a major claim so you can put them down for failing to live up to your standards of caring, when it was only a relative comparison.

> GP has no idea what it’s like

Which you are not trying to remedy. You are only trying to prove they don't care enough, as if that's going to somehow prove their original claim about flag use incorrect.

> I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate

Instead of? Does that mean no explanation even if you get them to donate?

> those who don’t listen to the simplest ask

Simple doesn't mean correct. Both sides of this argument are simple.

Well, maybe that's what the victor will write in the future history books, but since today's mapmakers don't know who's going to win that's not really a helpful perspective.