Stationary vs. waving flags (was: Re: Adding RAINBOW FLAG to Unicode)

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Mon Jul 6 15:40:22 CDT 2015


Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko at namakajiri dot net> wrote:

>> Is it your belief that users who wish to display an emoji flag care
>> whether the flag is shown stationary versus flapping in the wind?
>
> I think a waving white flag is an emoji symbol for
> "truce/surrender/come in peace", whereas a white rectangle doesn't
> easily transmit the same idea.

I don't know how many other flags have different semantics depending on
whether they are waving or not. I note that neither RIS pairs nor PRI
#299 sequences can encode a plain white flag (but of course the user can
simply choose between U+2690 and U+1F3F3 for that).

I hear Asmus's concern about using WAVING WHITE FLAG as the base
character for emoji flags which might not be depicted as waving.
However, in that case the solution would be to choose a different,
*single* base character. What Asmus wanted was

> to have different base characters that reflect whether it's a flag, a
> pennant, waving, flying from a flag stock or whatever other variety

and this is the problem I don't think can be solved, either with RIS
flags or with PRI #299 flags, regardless of the choice of base
character. Different platforms already show (e.g.) the French flag as
either waving or not waving.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO ����




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