On 31 May 2012, at 00:24, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
> There is definitely a problem.
The problem is the condescending revisionism you are about to indulge in, Mark.
> The origin is complicated. All that anyone really needed were 10 characters for emoji flags, encoded as compatibility characters.
This is incorrect. All that some guys in Japan who had never thought about character encoding did was to encode a few flags that they liked into some proprietary telephone standards. Then those flags started leaking into e-mails and one large company that you happen to work for decided that they needed to encode these blorts that the guys in Japan had put into their phones.
> However, certain people (I'll call Completionists)
This is condescending and offensive.
> who think that if you encode one member of a set (even for compatibility characters!), you need to encode all of them.
Members of ISO National Bodies quite properly thought that it is inapprioprate for an International Standard to encode the flags of some countries and not the flags of others. You can stuff your condescension, Mark.
> So the request expanded from 10 to all countries, then to all possible countries.
THIS is the actual proposal, Mark: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3680.pdf which you should have cited while you were rubbishing it. In my judgement it is better than the kludge that Martin criticized.
> And I wouldn't be surprised to have them then push for state/provincial flags for completeness, and who knows, maybe someday municipal flags (my old town http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sargans-coat_of_arms.svg).
You ALWAYS jump to this unwarranted conclusion, Mark. There are, outside of the UTC, people who are concerned that the symbol sets encoded are coherent and useful. We do not believe that "compatibility with industry" is always sufficient.
What you have said is insulting to the German and Irish National Bodies who proposed N3680, and to their representatives.
> So, some people came up with a way to handle this, using combinations of special characters. The only problem is that we didn't have lead and trail characters separately defined, to allow for an unambiguous mapping.
No, we came up with a good sensible scheme, and you wouldn't have it, so we the committees came up with the kludge of combining letters in pairs to represent these flags. That's what Martin is complaining about, and it's the UTC's fault that the scheme is complex rather than simple.
As far as your thesis that "ten flags are enough", that does not fly in an International Standard, and you ought well to know it.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Wed May 30 2012 - 18:55:07 CDT
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