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

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2012 21:01:52 +0200

2012/6/1 Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com>:
> The chances that any form of meta encoding for symbols (including ligation)
> will ever reach critical mass in support is less than for
> Latin/Greek/Cyrillic accents, because - as of today - there's no established
> use for any of these schemes.
>
> All of these things remain solutions in search of a problem.

No, my poposal gives something that is immediately usable, and does
not create any ambiguity. It is simple to implement even without the
presence of a technical ligaturing solution. Those flags will be
immediately usable, without any of the political complications created
by the case of flags. It will avoid prolieferations of proposals, and
infinite debates for encoding or not some flags, or for changing the
representative glyphs.

It ensures a stable solution for the long term, and still allows
further developments (that will take many years) to support a larger
set of flags (and also without the complications created by the fact
that these flags have semantically significant colors, that cannot be
ignored).

I won't support a proposal that wants to encode even just the basic
flags of UN member countries, because we will immediately fall into
the trap of the representative glyph, and the fact that they are
monochromatic (this is a MAJOR barrier against their encoding, as the
representative glyphs will create new confusions).

My solution allows distinctions immediately for ALL flags. It does not
limit the encoding. And then it allows renderers to use a better form
as seoon as they wish (provided that the alternate glyphs they will
generate for the composition preserves the initial semantic of the
encoded flag, and is not used to designate another country or flag, or
create confusions about which country is intended, notably if the
renderer only supports monochromatic outputs).

My solution will be reasoannably short : most flags for modern UN
member countries will be encoded with onle 2 symbolic characters.
Their behavior is clear, as well as their semantic, or behavior for
word-breaking and line breaking, aven if these symbols do not extended
the current definition of default graphme clusters (in my proposal,
**each** encoded symbol is a separate default grapheme cluster, even
when they are not replaced by a single "ligatured" glyph).

This is NOT a *meta* encoding, as it immediately has a concrete
realisation, not *requiring* a complex solution. A basic font
containing the few symbols (maximum: 192, divided in three subsets of
64 each) will be enough. This means a fast and easy deployement as
well (showing the actual graphic and colorful flags is left to
implementations and external specifications).
Received on Fri Jun 01 2012 - 14:04:21 CDT

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