Re: Flag tags (was: Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign)

A seemingly straightforward solution to the “unambiguous mapping” problem would be to use the existing Plane 14 tag letters along with a new FLAG TAG, say at U+E0002. Then <E0002, E0043, E0048> would unequivocally denote the current Swiss flag. No need for separate lead and trail. Simple.

... What’s that? Oh, sorry, never mind. Deprecated.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
From: Mark Davis ☕ 
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 17:24
To: Martin J. Dürst 
Cc: unicode Unicode Discussion 
Subject: Re: Flag tags (was: Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign)
There is definitely a problem. 
The origin is complicated. All that anyone really needed were 10 characters for emoji flags, encoded as compatibility characters. However, certain people (I'll call Completionists) who think that if you encode one member of a set (even for compatibility characters!), you need to encode all of them. So the request expanded from 10 to all countries, then to all possible countries. And I wouldn't be surprised to have them then push for state/provincial flags for completeness, and who knows, maybe someday municipal flags (my old town http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sargans-coat_of_arms.svg). 
So, some people came up with a way to handle this, using combinations of special characters. The only problem is that we didn't have lead and trail characters separately defined, to allow for an unambiguous mapping.
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Mark
— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —
On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 2:38 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst_at_it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote: 
... 
  On a slightly (although maybe only slightly) related matter, what about if Unicode didn't judge how difficult it should be to display national flags. Creating a way to display flags from two-tag combinations and then later realizing that a sequence of such tags didn't locally parse, and the whole thing has to be redone, doesn't seem like a very good alternative to just encoding these things (not that I think that just encoding these is a very good alternative either, though).
  Regards,   Martin.