After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font.
Problem solved! Can you imagine if, *gasp*, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror!
↫ Ryan Geyer
Silicon Valley corporations are nothing if not massive cowards, and this is just another one of the many, many examples that underline this. Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own, but Google refuses to do the same with Chrome, because, you guessed it, Google is also a cowardly organisation. There are some ways around it, as the linked article details, but they’re all clumsy and cumbersome compared to Microsoft just not being a coward and including proper flag emoji, even if it offends some sensibilities in pro-China or western far-right circles.
Your best bet to avoid such corporate cowardice is to switch to better operating systems, like any desktop Linux distribution. Fedora KDE includes both the Taiwanese and Palestinian flags, because the KDE project isn’t made up of cowards, and I’m sure the same applies to any GNOME distribution. If your delicate snowflake sensibilities can’t handle a Palestinian or Taiwanese flag emoji, just don’t type them.
Bitter sidenote: it turns out WordPress, what OSNews uses, doesn’t like emoji, either. Adding any emoji in this story, from basic ones to the Taiwanese or Palestinian flag, makes it impossible to save or publish the story. I have no idea if this is a WordPress issue, or an issue on our end, since WordPress does mention they have emoji support.
At least there is still the popcorn emoji (U+1F37F) when reading such news.
Thom Holwerda,
I had came across this problem too…ah here it is:
https://www.osnews.com/story/130858/text-editing-hates-you-too/#comment-10403829
Either the database is not set to utf8 (it should be but you never know) or wordpress is filtering out the emojis.
Remember this one? ꙮ
Fun times 🙂
I ‘ve encountered similar trouble with tables that were created with older versions of WordPress and MySQL. The first time it happened after a WordPress update. I exported the data, fixed the schema and then re-imported it. The second time, after a MySQL update, I converted the columns to binary blobs and then back to utf8mb4 (not just plain utf8). It’s been ok since then.
https://hyperborea.org/tech-tips/wp-character-mess/
KelsonV,
I think you’re right about utf8mb4, the old tables that were utf8 seem to be utf8mb3, which I guess isn’t big enough to hold the emoji codes. BTW you should be able to alter the column to use utf8mb4 directly without converting to a blob. It really should only be necessary to do once but there might be a few tables/columns involved.
Osnews is hosted by kinsta, a google cloud reseller for managed wordpress websites…I wonder if their setup scripts overlook utf8mb4? It’s possible they use “utf8” instead of “utf8mb4”.
interestingly the exception appears to be England, Scotland and Wales. These appear as little black flags for me.
A simple site to compare Flag Emoji if anyone is interested
https://flagpedia.net/emoji
Silicon valley is driven by marketing, marketing goes after every dollar with hopes to avoid alienating anyone, you’ll rarely find a controversial decision being made and it’s largely predictable where things will head. “Happy Holidays!”
I use ‘Happy Holidays’ too, unless I know what holidays someone celebrates, in which case I’ll wish them a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Eid, etc. I see no reason not to be inclusive. It’s a nice thing to do.
Agreed that SV are cowards though. My favourite example is Pride Month, when big tech will change its social media profile pictures in every region except the Middle East, Russia, and Africa. Gay rights are human rights except in inconvenient geographies, apparently.
Well, you can now probably add the USA to your list of “inconvenient” countries with which to celebrate diversity.
Mitch Kaplan from MS used to write these amazing blogs about all the quirks in internationalisation support in Windows and similar compromises like this one. I think MS scrubbed his blog as he didn’t part on the best of terms which is a huge lost knowledge, I can’t even find anything on Google either. He regrettably passed away from MS some time after leaving MS.
Don’t forget Kosovo and West Sahara and probably many more disputed countries.
And the “Republic of Donetsk”, the “Republic of Luhansk”, and “Transnistria”. Because if you have to include the flags of “Kosovo” and “Taiwan”, you have to include the flags of those too. See how it quickly becomes a hairy problem?
Nah, you can drawn the line wherever you want to as long as you’re willing to justify it or accept the complaints. Including one disputed country doesn’t require you to include all of them.
And what you don’t understand Thom is that companies have to obey the laws of countries they ship products to. For example, in the EU and UK, you know you’ve got a car that’s the exact same car sold to US buyers when it has the silly “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” in the side mirrors, which is a legal requirement in the US.
Similarly, if displaying the Taiwan flag as a country flag is illegal in China, Microsoft has to comply with that to ship a universal ISO.
Open-source projects such as Firefox have it easier because they only have to meet legal requirements in the country they are based in.
Also, personal pet-peeve: Emojis in Unicode are downright stupid, it takes a fairly closed problem (human writing) and makes it into an open-ended problem. This means Unicode implementations have to constantly catch-up to new Unicode versions, even when no new writing glyphs have been discovered in the meantime.
These liberals want to introduce their politics in tech and don’t stop making up new characters. Don’t they know that physical charset is binary? You are either a 0 or a 1.
@tom-holwerda since yesterday this article lost its title in the OSnews homepage.
Few other articles also lost their titles.
Their subtitles also disappeared into thin air.
> Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own
Apparently it is one of the countless tiny reasons making Firefox always tend to run slower than Chromium on any given hardware.