Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

This reminds me of the story about how the first release of Windows 95 was banned in India because 8 pixels of the map shown in the timezone selection control panel were colored in such a way that suggested parts of Kashmir were part of Pakistan.

https://www.cnet.com/news/how-eight-pixels-cost-microsoft-mi...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

Related to the original discussion, I wonder if there's a story behind how Taiwan got a emoji flag in the first place. Unicode Consortium referenced ISO 3166 for eligibility. Taiwan and a few other disputed regions didn't the cut until 3166-2 revision. The maintenance agency consists of representative from only western agencies. Interesting politics.

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.

It goes beyond that; technically, there are no flags in Unicode.

Instead, there are 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.

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.

> 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.

What do you have against feces and expressions of disgust/contempt?

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.

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.