RE: Tags and future new technologies (from RE: Flag tags (was: Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign))

From: Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>
Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:16:48 -0700

Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

> Note that I absolutely do not advocate the reuse of language tags for
> something else. They are deprecated and should remain deprecated. They
> were not intended to be visible symbols.

Just as a matter of terminology, the deprecated Plane 14 block is for
"tags" and not just for "language tags." The idea for such a block did
come from the proposal to support inline language tagging, and the only
defined type of tag is U+E0001 LANGUAGE TAG, but other tags could have
been introduced later for other purposes. By deprecating the entire
block and not just U+E0001, UTC essentially deprecated the whole tag
concept.

> I much prefer a solution that generates **true** symbols that can be
> combined, and **optionally** (but safely) rendered as ligatures (by
> design of the encoding itself) to render the true flags instead of
> showing their code in the list of glyphs (the default rendering in
> absence of recongnized ligatures).

I wish we would use some other term for these than "ligatures." They are
definitely not ligatures in the sense that any typographer, sign
painter, or reader would think of them. A picture of a French flag has
no imaginable visual relationship to the letter F or the letter R.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
Received on Fri Jun 01 2012 - 12:18:33 CDT

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