Re: [WhatsApp Support] Your Request: Windows Phone Client 2.10.523(ticket #7044796)

I think the idea of encoding "regional identifiers" instead of actual
flags was to avoid a political minefield, and that flags change over
time. (Afghanistan has haad something like 20 different flags) I also
imagine PR China wouldn't be too happy if someone wanted to encode a
Tibetan flag. You're also right about things like sporting events
where England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have seperate
teams, etc. Still, the use of flags as identifiers is common on the
web, at international confrences to identify delegates and so on.
With the arrival of colored fonts (supported in Windows 8.1) I suspect
people will inevitably try and make use of these characters - in spite
of all the current limitations you have pointed out.

I guess someone could come up with a private registry, similar to the
ConScript registry, where ways of encoding all kinds of symbols (e.g.
FC logos) using these identifiers could be listed.

On 06/08/2013, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> 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 - 01:23:24 CDT