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Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?

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> Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?

Not completely unheard of...

https://emojipedia.org/pistol/

Doesn't really count as "breaking Unicode".

Perhaps China can give Taiwan the finger without "breaking unicode" by simply demanding that fonts including the Taiwanese flag use a glyph that reads "One China Policy".

Toy pistol is still a pistol, so everything's alright. You'd have to replace the glyph with something that can still be considered Taiwanese flag.

Frankly that's an abuse of language. If you were to say

> "In the UK, it is legal for children to buy pistols"

Everybody would call you nuts. If you then smirked and said that water pistols are pistols, they'd groan at you.

No, now that's an abuse of logic and intention. We're talking about symbolic pictograms here, not laws. Just as you can depict emoticons by using humans, robots, colorful blobs or martians, you can depict pistols as toys, futuristic laser blowers, steampunk machinery or wild west revolvers. It's a symbol and you're free to show it any way you want.

We're talking about language, not cars. It's no different than if all the emoticons for cars were modified to be RC cars with large antennas surrounded by lighting bolts to signify that they're receiving radio transmissions. An RC car "is a car" a hypothetical you might protest, but a toy car is not the same in substance as "a car" in much the same way that a toy pistol is not the same in substance as "a pistol." Perhaps one day moralizing tech companies might even take this seriously and revise fonts to denormalize personal car ownership for the noble cause of environmental protection. Is that ridiculous? No moreso I'd argue than depicting all handguns as squirt guns.

Depicting "car" emoji as a toy car would be perfectly fine and within the artistic license of font makers. Just as depicting a toy gun is.

Imagine if they decided to turn the LGBT rainbow icon into a couple of hands holding each other, not to enhance the meaning of the glyph, but to, you know, protect children from gay ideas and make it harder for people to communicate about LGBT issues. Is that fair play? To me it sounds like somewhere between how dictionaries used to censor naughty words and 1984's newspeak.

No, because couple of hands holding each other doesn't represent "Rainbow Flag" (combination of "Waving White Flag" and "Rainbow" glyphs) in any way, so that's a clear spec violation.

However, if they decided to show a "rainbow painted on a white flag" instead of "rainbow-colored flag", it would be well within the Unicode spec. Of course it would have additional meaning and you can disagree with such decision on other grounds (I probably would), but it still wouldn't be "breaking Unicode", just like toy gun as "pistol" or toy car as "car" isn't. Hell, you can even make a font where every single emoji is depicted by toy cars doing silly faces and carrying things around.

> a clear spec violation

This is the meat of it. You don't give a shit about the spec.

This is not "breaking Unicode". They're just using a different font.

(Not trying to pass moral/political judgment, but let's please get the facts straight.)

Noted.

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