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Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Sat May 16 12:07:13 CDT 2015


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 ���� 



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