Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final

[Ken Whistler]

On 3/29/2017 1:12 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> I would think vendors could make their own business decisions about what
> flags to support. "Hmm, yeah, definitely Texas, maybe Lombardy, not so
> sure about Colorado, probably not Guna Yala." I don't see why they had
> to be essentially told what to support and what not to.

I think you have it approximately backwards. It isn't the UTC telling 
the vendors "what to support and what not to" -- it was the vendors 
saying "this is what we need to support, and we'd like to not do it in a 
haphazard way, so let's tell the UTC what we want them to document in 
the data for UTS #51."

You are correct that the vendors can make their own business decisions. 
And apparently as of now, Microsoft, for whatever reason, has made its 
business decision not to support flag emoji *at all* on its phones. 
O.k., that is their decision. So no Texas, no Lombardy, no Colorado, no 
Guna Yala, but also no Japan, no Great Britain, no Scotland... Other 
vendors have decided *to* support flag emoji on their phone platforms. 
O.k., that is their decision. *But*, the ones who do have flags on their 
phones don't want to be in the situation where the iPhone has a flag of 
Scotland which then shows up as a flag tofu on an Android phone, but an 
Android phone has a flag of Texas which then shows up as a flag tofu on 
on iPhone, etc., etc. That way leads to customer complaint madness, with 
1000's (hundreds of 1000's?) of complaints: "My phone is screwed up, fix 
it!"

Or maybe you want the job on the consumer complaint line about that 
topic. ;-)

--Ken