Flag tags with U+1F3F3 and subtypes

[Philippe Verdy]

If ever the country codes used in BCP47 becomes full (all pairs of letters
used), just some time before this happens, we could see new prefixes added
before a new range of code. It is possible to use a 1-letter prefix for new
country/territory code extensions, but with some maintenance of BCP47
parsing rules (notably the letter used should not be reordered with other
singleton prefixes)

But I feel it will first be simpler to assign a special 2-letter code like
"C1-" followed by a new new series of 2-letters country codes (ccTLDs will
survive, in fact with the development of new gTLDs not limited to 2
characters, the new countries will prefer asking for a more descriptive
gTLD, even if they don't have a 2-letter ccTLD.

Or 2-letter codes will be deprecated in favor of 3-letter codes (but the
IETF will keep all the existing 2-letter ccTLDs as long as their sponsors
support them (and don't require changing it to another TLD, even if this
breaks existing URLs encoded throughout the web).

There's no requirement for ISO 3166 codes to match exactly with a TLD in
the global DNS (this is already the case since long for the ".uk" ccTLD,
because ".gb" is almost unused). But the stability of couintry codes is
desirable as well in URLs (stored within encoded documented and for which
it will be hard to make global substitutions: the solution could be to use
tracking dates to resolve domain names, but the worldwide DNS currently
does not support this type of query by date and registrars would not like
to have to keep history files for long, and software/OS developers don't
want to include and maintain such data for their domain name resolving
clients).

It is however possible that in some future the existing URLs requiring
domain names will be deprecated in favor of unique IDs (e.g. based on
IPv6): users won't see ndomain names, but labels retreived from some
whois-like database, or shown by search engines and possibly translated. It
would be also an improvement even if this breaks the business of existing
registrars (however registrars will still have business for selling
PKI-related services). These IDs can also be used in URIs. In fact the DNS
system is already antique in its design (and its very strange and complex
encoding for IDNA that no one can read).


2015-05-18 22:10 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>:

> Markus Scherer <markus dot icu at gmail dot com> wrote:
>
> > As far as I can tell from your quotes, CLDR will say what's valid
> > (plus containment info), and Unicode permits you to show a flag for
> > any valid tag. North Lanarkshire seems perfectly fine.
>
> I'm under the impression that this will be a standard Unicode mechanism,
> defined in principle by TUS and in detail by the upcoming revision of
> UTR #51, with data (but no additional rules) supplied by CLDR.
>
> > I am curious to see if the redundant hyphen will be part of the
> > syntax.
>
> Like Philippe, I don't believe the hyphen is "redundant." ISO 3166-2
> requires it (Section 5.2), and the syntax diagram at the end of
> L2/15-145R shows it:
>
> B ((TL{2} (TH (TL|TD){3})?) | (TD{3}))
>
> where TH is TAG HYPHEN-MINUS.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO ����
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20150518/02d6b0ca/attachment.html>