No more RGI flag sequences

[Harriet Riddle]

Some rambling targeted at noöne in particular…

What should be RGI for flags is a bit confusing, even when subregions are not considered.

For instance, UM is a country code for the United States Minor Outlying Islands. This has no permanent population and, as such, no flag (official or not) besides that of the United States. Hence, the inclusion of it is a largely pointless duplicate encoding of the flag of the United States. However, it is widely supported across vendors.

Meanwhile, the subregional code iqar corresponds to Erbil Governorate, Erbil being the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan Region. If a flag emoji encoding can show the flag of a larger region in absence of a more specific flag (like with the UM example), then I'd deduce that the subregional code iqar may be a perfectly reasonable encoding for the Kurdish flag.

So does Unicode *really* exclude the Kurdish flag, as some who would kick up a stink might claim? There is no clean yes or no answer, much as there is no clean answer for Northern Ireland. The code is valid, but if it's not RGI, will any vendor try to support it… given that besides some legacy kept around by Samsung, what's RGI might tend to determine what new emoji "exist"?

All of that being said, I doubt vendors would want to *remove* the flag of e.g. Scotland, though, since that would send a message in itself.

— Har.
________________________________
From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at unicode.org> on behalf of Michael Everson via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 7, 2021 8:19:19 PM
To: Unicode@ <unicode at unicode.org>
Subject: Re: No more RGI flag sequences

On 7 Feb 2021, at 19:33, Mark Davis ☕️ via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>
> The main issue for making N. Ireland be RGI was the lack of an official flag. It is valid (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁮󠁩󠁲󠁿).

This is the mistake that the Consortium made. There is a flag which is widely and publicly in use. What is “official” or “unofficial” about it is a decision taken without due consideration to the realities of the political settlement in Britain and Ireland.

Who uses flags and why? Nationalists in the North may prefer to use the Irish tricolour 🇮🇪. Unionists may wish to use the Union flag 🇬🇧. Who cares? That’s for people who want to refer to a national flag. The fact of the matter is that the United Kingdom is composed of three countries and one province. And in reality, FOUR flags are used particularly in sport.

"The Ulster Banner was carried by the Northern Ireland team in the Commonwealth Games. It is also regularly displayed by supporters of the Northern Ireland national football team and is displayed by FIFA as the flag of Northern Ireland.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Northern_Ireland

The decision to refuse to include the Ulster Banner for Northern Ireland was a really dumb decision. No good was served by it. Instead of using common sense, “the lack of an official flag” was used as an excuse. It doesn’t make the Consortium look good.

Michael Everson



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