The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think

Re:The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think by colejohnson66 on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @08:47AM (#27049190)

Technically, flag emojis are just two codepoints that encode two Latin letters. They are the “regional indicator symbols”[0]. This solves the problem of countries coming and going, and leaves the job of implementing them all to the font designer (through ligatures), not Unicode.

For example, the US flag is composed(?) as U+1F1FA U+1F1F8 (REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U) and U+1F1F8 (REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S).

It can get even crazier with “emoji tags”[1]. Say you want to encode the flag for California, US. You’d think it’d be done using those regional indicators as “CA”, but that’s actually Canada. The way to do it is: U+1F3F4 U+E0075 U+E0073 U+E0063 U+E0061 U+E007F. This encodes a black emoji flag, “USCa” in tag characters, and a “tag cancel” code point.

Basically, if your font has symbols for countries that don’t exist yet, or are missing some, that’s on the font designer, not Unicode.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)

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Re:The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think by 542458 on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @08:56AM (#27049261)

True, but Unicode does say that all alpha-2 codes are valid. So while Unicode isn’t saying “this is a list of countries you need flags for”, they do say “go here to find the list of countries you need flags for” - which is mostly a (reasonable) decision to punt political pressure onto somebody else :)

So all that to say: Unicode is still representing language and/or written culture as it is at a point in time (which may be less relevant in the future) - and that’s OK, and absolutely compatible with their aims.

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