The encoding of flags

[William_J_G Overington]

In

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21172-esc-recs.pdf

Emoji Subcommittee Report Q4, 2021

There is a section entitled

Closing the Door on Flag Category F4

There is included the following.

> We encourage vendors to instead support inline images, such as 
> stickers, GIFs, and so on

My concern is that it is one thing for large organizations to agree on 
common standards that benefit consumers, but quite another for them to 
be asked at a meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee to agree to 
restrict future development. It is not what they are there to do. Are 
they allowed to do that as there is no basis for that restriction 
benefitting consumers?

There could be a quite straightforward solution. Simply register with 
index numbers expressed in a sequence of tag digit characters all flags 
for which a glyph is supplied, as a white flag followed by a sequence of 
tag digits followed by a cancel tag. That way people who want flags 
encoded for unambiguous plain text use get what they want.

William Overington

Wednesday 6 October 2021