Re: Tag characters

​A few notes.

A more concrete proposal will be in a PRI to be issued soon, and people
will have a chance to comment more then. (I'm not trying to discourage
discussion, just pointing out that there will be something more concrete
relatively soon to comment on—people are pretty busy getting 8.0 out the
door right now.)

The principal reason for 3 digit codes is because that is the mechanism
used by BCP47 in case ISO screws up codes (as they did for CS).

The syntax does not need to follow the 3166 syntax - the codes correspond
but are not the same anyway. So we didn't see the necessity for the hyphen,
syntactically.

There is a difference between EU and UN; the former is in BCP47. That being
said, we could look at making the exceptionally reserved codes valid for
this purpose (or at least the UN code). It appears that there are only 3
exceptionally reserved codes that aren't in BCP47: EZ, UK, UN.

Just because a code is valid doesn't mean that there is a flag associated
with it. Just like the fact that you can have the BCP47 code ja-Ahom-AQ
doesn't mean that it denotes anything useful. I'd expect vendors to not
waste time with non-existent flags. However, we could also discuss having a
mechanism in CLDR to help provide guidelines as to which subdivisions are
suitable as flags.

Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis>

*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org> wrote:

> L2/15-145R says:
>
> On some platforms that support a number of emoji flags, there is
>> substantial demand to support additional flags for the following:
>> [...]
>> Certain supra-national regions, such as Europe (European Union flag)
>> or the world (e.g. United Nations flag). These can be represented
>> using UN M49 3-digit codes, for example "150" for Europe or "001" for
>> World.
>>
>
> These are uncomfortable equivalence classes. Not all countries in Europe
> are members of the European Union, and the concept of "United Nations" is
> not really the same by definition as "all countries in the world."
>
> The remaining UN M.49 code elements that don't have a 3166-1 equivalent
> seem wholly unsuited for this mechanism (and those that do, don't need it).
> There are no flags for "Middle Africa" or "Latin America and the Caribbean"
> or "Landlocked developing countries."
>
> Some trans-national organizations might _almost_ seem as if they could be
> shoehorned into an M.49 code element, like identifying 035 "South-Eastern
> Asia" with the ASEAN flag, but this would be problematic for the same
> reasons as 150 and 001.
>
> Among the ISO 3166-1 "exceptionally reserved" code elements are "EU" for
> "European Union" and "UN" for "United Nations." If these flags are the use
> cases, why not simply use those alpha-2 code elements, instead of burdening
> the new mechanism with the 3-digit syntax?
>
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
>
Received on Tue May 19 2015 - 00:20:33 CDT