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| ▲ | dang a day ago | parent | next [-] | | "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin a day ago | parent [-] | | This is a thread about flag emojis, hardly tangential! And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal with variable-length encodings and "grapheme cluster" nonsense just to keep one country happy. dang, you have impugned my honor. I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel! Nerf guns at twenty paces. | | |
| ▲ | dang a day ago | parent [-] | | IMO veering from minutiae of 5-codepoint Unicode sequences to hot geopolitics ("for fairly obvious reasons") is a classic generic flamewar tangent, in the textbook sense of "tangent": there's one point in common and otherwise the lines don't intersect at all. These tangents always go in the same direction, too: they bump the thread off the back road (obscure Unicode details!) and onto the well-paved multi-line highway (to hell!). None of that matters though, if you're going to be as good-humored as this! |
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| ▲ | bawolff 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I dont really think that makes sense as Taiwan flag is already there. | | |
| ▲ | gnabgib 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There are no country flags in UTF. The flag you're seeing is the interpretation of a 2 character ISO country code by your OS. > Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded. This allows the Unicode consortium to avoid any issues surrounding which countries to include (and, de facto, recognize), instead leaving it entirely to the system implementation as to which flags to include (see: partially recognized state). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol | | |
| ▲ | bawolff 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure. My point still stands, you can already encode Taiwan's flag, so what is China allegedly objecting to? | | |
| ▲ | decimalenough 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other things about that entity), but Unicode doesn't offer any opinions on that. | | |
| ▲ | maxglute 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | To clarify, 3166-1 is for countries, dependent territories (i.e. Guam), special areas (Taiwan, Hong Kong) i.e. TW gets a flag being in 3166-1 list but under UN resolution 2758, PRC gets to subsume TW as special area - "Taiwan (Province of China)". 3166-2 is for subdivisions (TW provinces, UNDER CHINA), i.e. all TW provinces are considered subdivisions of China/PRC. Same with HK. Unicode doesn't offer opinion in the sense the opinion is whatever UN recognize as countries, which will never include TW as long as PRC holds P5 veto. In the meantime this arrangement works out since ROC constitution still legally asserts it's but part of One China polity, i.e. it doesn't matter what TWers think or DPP claims, or tries to legally engineer (additional articles /legal fiction limiting ROC political jurisdiction to "free area" of tw + islands). Until TW voters&politicians actually formally separates / declares independence, as in change ROC constitution by renounce claims on mainland, they'll lose 3166-1 designation because PRC gets to remove them, and won't get a new one because PRC veto. They'll lose their emojis (maybe iso codes, maybe domain depending on US/ICANN drama)... which TBH will be least of their worries. | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment. | | |
| ▲ | decimalenough 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Legally speaking, Taiwan is a province of China according to both the PRC and ROC. Of course, they both claim that they are the "China" in question. | | |
| ▲ | adastra22 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a clear tell that your knowledge of the situation is basically just Wikipedia plus media reporting. Approximately nobody in Taiwan views it that way. It is an obscure legal fiction of no relevance. It only persists because of a red line drawn by the PRC. It’s kind of like how New Zealand is included as a province of Australia, technically, in their constitution. | | |
| ▲ | decimalenough 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I didn't saw anything about how people view this? As you state, it's a legal fiction, but it's quite useful in numerous contexts like this, because it lets Unicode de facto include the Taiwan flag without actually including the Taiwan flag. | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | lern_too_spel 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | While a previous government of Taiwan claimed that it was the legitimate ruler of China, the current government does not. It considers itself to be a separate sovereign state. The KMT that fought for control of China and fled the mainland is only a small fraction of Taiwan's population and only ruled over the majority by political suppression. | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not very wrong but maybe at least half of population will not agree with that |
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| ▲ | cluckindan 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Taiwan is the last vestige of original ”China” and PRC already redefined it when Taiwan (ROC) lost the mainland to the communists in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War. |
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| ▲ | sunaookami 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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