Oh No! I've invented SVG badly!
The author reflects on their attempt to create a new system for flag emojis inspired by Unicode's family emoji. Initially, the idea seemed simple, focusing on horizontal and vertical stripes with color modifiers. However, as the concept evolved, it became overly complex, resembling a graphics language that Unicode would likely reject.
- ▪The author was inspired by the way Unicode creates diverse family emojis.
- ▪They proposed a minimal system for flag emojis using horizontal and vertical stripes.
- ▪As the idea developed, it became complicated, resembling a graphics language rather than a simple emoji system.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Billpg |
| Canonical URL | https://owl.billpg.com/on-no-ive-invented-svg-badly/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 06:26:54 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T06:49:57.540Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T06:49:57.540Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wpQ5tYC1rKjW |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Posted on May 29, 2026 by billpgOn no! I’ve invented SVG badly! It started, as these things often do, with a tiny spark of inspiration. I was looking at the way Unicode builds those racially diverse family emoji. These use ZWJ sequences to glue together adults, children, and skin‑tone modifiers into a single little glyph. It’s clever, constrained, and surprisingly elegant. It gave me an idea. What if you could do the same thing for flags? Unicode already has national flag emojis along with 🏳️🌈, 🏳️⚧️, 🏴☠️, 🏁,🏳️,🏴,🚩 and the countries-in-our-hearts, 🏴, 🏴, 🏴. But no more. The people in charge of assigning codes have decided this is too much of a geopolitical and culture-war nightmare so these are all the flags we’re going to get.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Billpg.
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