OK I see the point of the PRI. But using joiners in the middle of the same
flag is worse than just using start/end (which also have a clean way to e
mapped to glyphs without using complex rendering like ligatures :
start+RIS...+RIS+end can fully be converted to individual glyphs producing
a flag showing the region code in the middle (good for simple editors) and
then ligaturing can be aplied if needed on sequences to generate actual
flags (possibly colorful as emoji icons)
Your PRI does not dolve the problem of versioning, notaly in ISO 3166 which
is not stable, e.g. for [CS], but as well for chaging flags of a country.
You'll need dates or other specifiers in extensions of the code. The
start/end solution also ensures stability of the default rendering without
having to create and maintain any registry for the actual flags (this cold
be made on another project, e.g. by maintainers and participants of the
Flags of the World on their existing collaborative site, just the same way
that Unicode does not have to maintain a dictionary of all words of a
language. The start+RIS+end solution would act like a "word" in its own
language, using its own ortography, and would be freed from ISO 3166-1
dependency.
Font creators would immediately be able to provide a font with a reasonable
default rendering which will be suitable for the default, monochromatic,
rendering of these "words". It would then be up to other applications to
decide which word they recognize to replace them by colorful flag icons or
emojis. The problem is solved once for Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. The
Unicode standard just has too say that these "words" can be freely replaced
by icons showing a flag of the same encoded entity. It does not have to
specify which ones, just like Unicode does not mandate any typographical
ligatures (however TUS may specify the internal syntax of these encoded
flags, to ensure that it would be compatible with ISO 3166 or with some
other flags libraries like the IOC flags and codes.
For Unicode however, the codes will be treated as all different : if [FR]
is used for representing France, [-IOC-FRA] for reprenting the French
Olympic team, both could display exactly the same flag (and [MQ] could as
well display the same flag or the cultural regional flag, becayuse here
there's no other qualifier to say which one to use, and both are valid ;
but if only the official national flag used in UN must be used then
[-UN-MQ] will only display the tricolor flag, and if needed a versioning
sufix could be used) The syntax could be similar to the syntax developed
for language tags (or locale tags).
2013/8/5 Christopher Fynn <chris.fynn_at_gmail.com>
> On 05/08/2013, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> > The way I perceive the regional indicators (in Uncode 6.0), they are
> > absolutely not used and will be never used at all as long as there are no
> > complements such as the minimum brackets I suggest to fix them. The 26
> > letter-like characters are basically broken in their identity, you can't
> > safely align multiple flags or delimit them with break iterators, like
> you
> > can break words, paragraphs, syllables (in some languages this is
> difficult
> > as it is contextual too, but not impossible, and in many languages you
> can
> > find syllabel breaks without having to parse backward on indefinite
> length)
> > or lines.
>
> See:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/review/pri215/pri215-background.html
>
> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12284r3-reg-indicator-seg.pdf
>
Received on Tue Aug 06 2013 - 00:11:56 CDT
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