No more RGI flag sequences

[Kent Karlsson]

> 8 feb. 2021 kl. 19:13 skrev Doug Ewell via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:
> 
> Christoph Päper wrote:
> 
>> For all other (sub-)national flag emojis, Unicode does not suggest a
>> particular design, not raus its existence for the RGI label. Vendors
>> would be free to display the one of TW the same as CN, for instance,
>> but they decided to not show it at all in devices for the mainland
>> Chinese market.
> 
> I agree with Christoph here. Having two (or more) flag designs to choose from when rendering a flag image is a matter of glyph design, just like having single-story and double-story glyph variants of the letters 'a' and 'g’.

Hmm, while those examples have a high degree of ”free variation” between ”single-story” and ”double-story” (as well as other variations), the situation with flags is not quite the same.

While one in may ”freely” vary between ”flat” and ”faking wavy” designs for flag glyphs, and even distort some proportions (but not too much), many other differences are either wrong or time dependent.

And that is a major flaw in the denotation design for flags in Unicode. But sometimes nations change flags, sometimes a little bit, sometimes radically. And then ”we” are in trouble. I would say changing glyphs from the design used in one era to another used in another era (for the same, or nearly the same territory) would be the same as changing character identity for a ”normal” coded character, like changing the code for A to suddenly be displayed as a B.

Even though different flags may ”denote” the same territory over time, using the wrong one in a ”timed” document would be an error. In some cases one or the other design may even be offensive (which has obviously happened historically, and even now in some places). Of course one can use images for flags, assuming the document format allows for embedding images, rather than Unicode denotations for flags. That would solve such problems, but now we are discussing the Unicode way of denoting flags.

> And no vendor or font designer is ever required to include glyphs for every Unicode character or sequence, "recommended" or not.

Agree with that (in principle…).

/Kent K

> 
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> Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org
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