alt Hacker NewsWhy 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)
Replies
The part i dont like is that country flags are encoded via country code, so if the regime changes (and adopts a new flag) all the flags in your document retroactively change.
This could have very different meaning. E.g. flag of Afghanistan before vs after the Taliban took over.
One of the points of Unicode was to replace every other existing text encoding. This requires enough fidelity to be able to round-trip the text back and forth to them so that you can receive data in another text encoding, store it in Unicode, and then spit it back out in that same other text encoding without anything having changed.
The classic IBM PC text encoding ("codepage 437") already contains the card suits, gender symbols, and box drawing characters which are not text glyphs, so any "non-text symbols" battle was lost before it even started.
The point of Unicode is to try and be the One True Encoding and remove the need for all other language encoding standards, so there's never any more "mojibake" or cross-border compatibility issues. In order to do this, every feature that has existed in other encoding standards has to be supported in Unicode, or else people will stick to that other encoding in some circumstances.
With emoji specifically, they were popular in Japan dating all the way back to the 90s, via carrier-specific encoding standards. The lack of emoji support in messaging was a reason that the iPhone and Android were slower than expected to take off in Japan, and so Apple and Google asked the Unicode Consortium to add emoji support, so they could have this feature on their phones while sticking to a universal encoding standard. IIRC, the Unicode Consortium was actually hesitant to do this and didn't want to be involved with standardizing pictograms into Unicode, but eventually relented.
> Flags are... not text.
Neither is poop, and yet someone decided that was important enough to include.
The reason I've heard is because Japanese phone companies had invented their own version of emojis on their own encoding scheme pre unicode, and to switch over, they needed unicode to also include support for these emoji, which is why a lot of them are very Japan specific.
Emojis then blew up with the rest of the world once people worked out how to enable them on the iphone. And since unicode has unlimited space for new emoji, there is little reason to deny any widely used symbol an emoji representation.