The 10 listed "flags" are those that existed in some private SJIS
extensions that were considered for creating a (limited) interoperablity
between them, suing the UCS as a common encoding. If these SJIS extensions
had not existed, we would probably have never heard anything about these
"regional indicators".
My opinion is that for now, they will only be used in association with
these SJIS apps, and that they are not usable with something else, even if
the UCS encoded the full set of 26 letters (just to avoid further political
discussions about why only these 10 countries were included).
So effectively the UCS extended what was really needed for interoperability
by allowing their use for all countries (or dependant territories...) that
are encoded as two letters in ISO 3166-1.
But I wonder what Unicode will do if some Japan operator includes the
imperial Japanese flag (with sun rays) as another Emoji in addition to the
current civil flag (only the red disc on white) . Or if it includes a
"flag" Emoji showing a part of the Bitish flag and a part of the US flag (a
common icon found to designate the English language and not really a single
country). Or the flag with the ASEAN logo (like this one:
http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/02196/images/aseanlogo.gif).
The current encoding scheme limited to ISO 3166-1 2-letter codes will not
work, it will require an extension
2013/8/6 Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>
> Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>
> > Anyway the only sequences that are mapped to regional indicators are
> > for private extensions of SJIS in Japan, respetively from KDDI and
> > SoftBank
> >
> > 1F1E8 1F1F3;;F3D2;FBB3 # [CN] People's Republic of China
> > 1F1E9 1F1EA;;F3CF;FBAE # [DE] Germany
> > 1F1EA 1F1F8;;F348;FBB1 # [ES] Spain
> > 1F1EB 1F1F7;;F3CE;FBAD # [FR] France
> > 1F1EC 1F1E7;;F3D1;FBB0 # [GB] United Kingdom
> > 1F1EE 1F1F9;;F3D0;FBAF # [IT] Italian
> > 1F1EF 1F1F5;;F6A5;FBAB # [JP] Japan
> > 1F1F0 1F1F7;;F3D3;FBB4 # [KR] Korean
> > 1F1F7 1F1FA;;F349;FBB2 # [RU] Federation of Russia
> > 1F1FA 1F1F8;;F790;FBAC # [US] United States of America
>
> I was surprised to read this, because I thought the whole purpose of
> creating the regional indicators was to allow extension to other
> national flags, via those nations' ISO 3166-1 code elements, and to
> avoid showing favoritism toward those specific 10 flags.
>
> N3727 says: "The request is to add 26 characters for letters used for
> representation of regional indicators, which would be used in sequences
> within, for example, emoji protocols to represent the 10 regional
> indicators (or possible future extensions)."
>
> TUS 6.2, Section 15.10 does not mention the 10 combinations listed
> above, but does suggest they are the only relevant ones: "The regional
> indicator symbols in the range U+1F1E6..U+1F1FF can be used in pairs to
> represent an ISO 3166 region code... the main purpose of such pairs is
> to provide unambiguous roundtrip mappings to certain characters used in
> the emoji core sets."
>
> Is it true that the regional indicator mechanism is intended only for
> these 10 combinations, in the absence of a formal "future extension"? I
> thought emoji in Unicode were no longer meant to be tied to the
> repertoires of Japanese telcos.
>
> > This limited set of "flags" highly suggests that in fact these flags
> > are used not really to convey a regional information, but only a set
> > of well known languages used in these countries and spoken/written
> > internationally i.e. these are frequently visual indicators of the
> > language, for use in web menus for language selection (even if it is a
> > common but bad practice):
>
> They're emoji, so I don't think we can really say what they are used
> for. The most common use of <1F1EF 1F1F5> might be to decorate tweets on
> National Foundation Day.
>
> The presence of both American and British flags does suggest usage
> outside of language identification, which I agree maps extremely poorly
> to national flags.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
> http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell
>
>
>
>
Received on Tue Aug 06 2013 - 12:48:45 CDT
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