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.
Isn't there a pretty objective and non-political case that Taiwan is it's own country? It has its own laws and government, and has presided over its own affairs for more than 50 years. Whether the CCP wishes this was not the case doesn't affect the reality on the ground.
You must be new to this dispute. Personally I tend to agree with you but in the international game of power politics, stating explicitly what is implicitly clear to everyone can have large repercussions.
All politics is a charade to some extent, a social game humans play to achieve a result which we can't really get to otherwise; international politics is simultaneously more obviously a charade and precisely the place where keeping up the charade is most important, because the consequences are far more present.
In national politics, there's a government and that government has a police force and a military. Regardless of which political party or coalition is in control, the government goes on, day to day, running things, which includes holding elections, the magic which gives legitimacy to the process. As long as elections are real, the people are mostly willing to go along with it, so the consequences of utterly disregarding legitimacy remain remote.
International politics has no such entity, or at least none that has sufficient recognition. Therefore, it is essential that everyone play along with the norms, because deviating from those norms is more likely to spark a war.
Ultimately, a country is what a majority recognize as such; before you go away, however, consider how long you'd live if you insisted you were human but couldn't get anyone else to agree with you.
Can you unpack what you mean by ‘charade’...? In particular, why did you choose that word? Are you suggesting it is fake? Fake in what sense?
One useful definition of politics is this: systems and behavior that result from people disagreeing without violence.
Politics can occur in convincing a group of people where to go to dinner, that your technical idea is worthy of effort, or that a President must be held accountable to the rule of law.
> Can you unpack what you mean by ‘charade’...? In particular, why did you choose that word? Are you suggesting it is fake? Fake in what sense?
I'm suggesting it's fake in the sense that it pretends things are real which are not physically real, like national boundaries and countries and other jurisdictions. Los Angeles County has no physical existence beyond the people who pretend it's real.
> One useful definition of politics is this: systems and behavior that result from people disagreeing without violence.
I agree with this, but it doesn't capture people pretending administrative jurisdictions exist. How taxes work is a good example of the charade becoming useful: Services have to be paid for, so taxes must be collected somehow. How do you do that without making people feel like they're paying for a lot of stuff they're not getting? By drawing lines on a map and saying that everyone who lives within those lines pays these taxes, and everyone who lives outside of those lines pays those taxes, and so on. Poof: You have a way to pay for things which gives people some kind of choice in the matter beyond just voting. That's important because other, more real, effects of the economy can determine which areas have rich people and which areas have poor people.
Not only a country but Taiwan is officially the Republic of China. The government of China under Chiang Kai-shek established itself in Taiwan. If anything Taiwan is China and the PRC is the remnants of a communist overthrow.
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.
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.
And for additional context, I believe every major OS vendor and many apps that bundle their own locale data have modifications on top of the stock CLDR database. Those modifications are mostly handled by legal teams, not by engineering.
> 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.
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.
Compare also AUBERGINE and PEACH, which have both picked up alternate meanings to fill in for certain popular anatomical values that Unicode has elected not to define.
EDIT: seems HN removes emoji. I understand why, but it makes discussions like this one somewhat annoying.
EDIT: I've removed a somewhat vulgar reference to what those alternate meanings are, as it seems to have upset some people. I was trying to make a real point about how users will fill in the gaps when demand exists, even if Unicode omits them.
Whoever renders the text. Since most applications delegate to the OS for that, it's typically the OS. The OS generally follows whatever the jurisdiction it's sold in requires. In theory an application could override it by doing custom rendering of these codepoints.
The unicode standard doesn't care, as explained above, since it just defines an alphabet and takes no position in which country/locale codes are to be rendered with a flag.
I think they err on the side of including flags in case of controversy, as there are flag emoji for Kosovo and Palestine. The main exception is North Cyprus, which just gets ignored.
Of course, when I set my region to Israel, the Palestine flag is still available. Likewise for Serbia and Kosovo.
Israel does not deny existence of Palestine state, they disagree about borders. It’s completely different from between PRC: PRC claims they are the only true China, and Taiwan should be a part of it.
