Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

I like how the Unicode Consortium really doesn't want to accept any more flags, but you can still probably shoehorn them in if you're Apple or Google and you have a glyph sequence that is backwards compatible. One way of getting things done -- just do it.

I knew the details behind this because Windows 10 didn't include font with the trans flag by default, and so it always rendered as flag + trans symbol. I eventually installed the emoji font from the Windows 11 betas and found much of what I read to suddenly be a lot nicer looking.

P.S. I love the effects on this website :3

As much as I appreciate the expressiveness that comes from emojis and flags in Unicode, I am rather shocked by the growing technical complexity of decoding unicode into rwndwrable graphemes. Unicode was already worryingly complex before all of these new combinations were introduced. Properly parsing Unicode is close to obtaining this "don't roll your own" status that has has so far been reserved for the likes of networking and cryptography libraries. Unicode, even if UTF-8 encoded, is now such a far cry from the old 8 bit charsets that's still being inplicitly assumed by so many standard libraries of programming languages.

This is so cool!

Written like this, emojis look a bit like stargate addresses [1F3F3 FE0F 200D 26A7 FE0].

I knew that emoji symbols have a way of using modifiers but this is the first time I’m getting a glimpse into the process of iterating on a proposal. Thanks for sharing!

That's cool thank you.

I hope they add the bi flag one day.

  Blimey!  After I engaged reader mode, all was revealed 8)  

I love how you have considered so many ways to ensure that it will degrade gracefully, as far as is possible for certain glyph handling capabilities.

Good skills ... how on earth does this work? I pasted your glyph quite a lot and found that backspace changes it into the other flag:

EDIT: Oh dear, HN strips out funky glyphs so this post looks a bit odd.

Wow - this site is incredibly designed. Makes me remember how vivid and unique the internet of my youth used to be.

I’m having a really hard time reading with the background particles.

You really need to add a toggle for the effects, it makes it hard to read.

Man, Unicode is a complex thing. All sorts of directionality and reinterpretation to it. What a terrible beast to wrangle. Glad someone else is doing it and I can stick to ASCII.

Also, this website is delightfully hilarious. It's got music. I haven't seen that since the old days. Very nostalgic. I read in Reader Mode, but enjoyed the expression of self.

Inspiring to see women getting into the far weeds of the unicode technical standard.

Why are flags part of unicode? I thought the point of unicode was to add something for every glyph ever written in every text so they can be stored digitally as plain text. Flags are... not text. And who decides what sorts of flags and valid which aren't? I mean... we know who.. .but humour me.

(didn't read the article because the website is deliberately unreadable. zero guilt)

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I wish they stuck to languages only, instead of branching out into modern hieroglyphics. There are enough forces hacking away at literacy as it is. Flags are particularly wasteful, given that nations and movements can be highly ephemeral.

I hate to be rude, but I found the writing quite difficult to follow in its technical aspects, and the pink and black glitter formatting was the last straw. I ended up dumping it into ChatGPT to rewrite the technical content in a form that’s easier to follow, in the hopes of elevating the discussion - I hope I don’t have to do this often on HN, but the technical story was interesting enough that it’s worth rescuing: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/58fe0c16f03455721420b768...