BES island flags

[Christoph Päper]

Doug Ewell:
> 
> They decided, “We’ll make the other three ‘Recommended for General Interchange,’ but not GB-NIR.”

Unicode first needed to define a completely new method involving otherwise unused Tag characters to encode ISO 3166-2 codes as emoji flags. This enabled _thousands_ of new valid sequences, not all of which have a definitive flag design associated. Of these, only _three_ were RGIed then. (Few years before, a dozen of preexisting emoji flags lead to the systematic encoding of about two hundred geographic codes, some of which have no unique flag associated with them.) The only preexisting implementation (WhatsApp) used a different method (RIS ‘XE’ etc.) which was absolutely sufficient for handling just a handful of flags. 

UTC created a kind of Mexican standoff thereafter: they expect vendors to show implementation interest in certain flag emojis before formally recommending any further ones, while vendors are waiting for the consortium to recommend certain codes for implementation before taking action.