Re: Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 23:53:13 +0200

And the new region of Normandie still has no formal code, but it reuses a
flag that was used by one of the two former regions.
Technically I don't see that as a problem except that people may want to
display that flag using the code for the former region and semantically
this is different (and also different from the former Duchy before it was
partly annexed by France and left the Channel Islands to the new English
Crown in the Middle Age.
If we are concerned only by encoding modern entities, anyway if these
sequences are encoded, there will be nobody to restrict their reuse for
past entities (jsut kike Unicode cannot rule against the use of a capital
Greek Alpha replacing a Capital Latin A, or the fancy use of Latin for
"ASCII art", as Unicode does not encode orthographies or languages).
Once a sequence is registered, even if it is intended to represent a modern
entity, anyone will be using them as they want. This gives also a hint
about why encoding stability will be important. But as we know, the
regional or national entities are changing their flags and sometimes
reusing former flags from other entities. Sooner or later, there will be
confusion.
I would suggest that if renderers have the capability of rendering colorful
flags and provide an UI, at least they should be also rendering some hints,
notably the underlying code or a name if available, using for example
mousehover events to explain these flags and their intended usage: if a
former flag is reused by another entity, that new entity should have its
own encoding and the former flags should not be affected (its displayed
hint should still indicate a reference to their former meaning).

2017-03-27 23:32 GMT+02:00 Richard Wordingham <
richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>:

> On Mon, 27 Mar 2017 13:34:09 -0700
> Ken Whistler <kenwhistler_at_att.net> wrote:
>
> > And if a flag of
> > California (or Pomerania or ...) then gets added to the list of emoji
> > tag sequences in a future version of the data, there is a good chance
> > that the "users" will then see the difference, because that flag will
> > appear on their phones eventually.
>
> Indeed, why isn't the flag of Texas there already so as to terminate
> the abuse of <U+1F1E8, U+1F1F1>. Technically, at least, it has the
> justification of being a formerly independent country, though I don't
> know that they have any national teams.
>
> Is anyone working on the issue of flags for the whole of Ireland?
> Different sports have their own 'national' flags.
>
> Pomerania will be a bit tricky, as it isn't any recent administrative
> division.
>
> Richard.
>
Received on Mon Mar 27 2017 - 16:53:50 CDT

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