OK I see the point of the PRI. But using joiners in the middle of the same flag is worse than just using start/end (which also have a clean way to e mapped to glyphs without using complex rendering like ligatures : start+RIS...+RIS+end can fully be converted to individual glyphs producing a flag showing the region code in the middle (good for simple editors) and then ligaturing can be aplied if needed on sequences to generate actual flags (possibly colorful as emoji icons)
Your PRI does not dolve the problem of versioning, notaly in ISO 3166 which is not stable, e.g. for [CS], but as well for chaging flags of a country. You'll need dates or other specifiers in extensions of the code. The start/end solution also ensures stability of the default rendering without having to create and maintain any registry for the actual flags (this cold be made on another project, e.g. by maintainers and participants of the Flags of the World on their existing collaborative site, just the same way that Unicode does not have to maintain a dictionary of all words of a language. The start+RIS+end solution would act like a "word" in its own language, using its own ortography, and would be freed from ISO 3166-1 dependency. Font creators would immediately be able to provide a font with a reasonable default rendering which will be suitable for the default, monochromatic, rendering of these "words". It would then be up to other applications to decide which word they recognize to replace them by colorful flag icons or emojis. The problem is solved once for Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. The Unicode standard just has too say that these "words" can be freely replaced by icons showing a flag of the same encoded entity. It does not have to specify which ones, just like Unicode does not mandate any typographical ligatures (however TUS may specify the internal syntax of these encoded flags, to ensure that it would be compatible with ISO 3166 or with some other flags libraries like the IOC flags and codes. For Unicode however, the codes will be treated as all different : if [FR] is used for representing France, [-IOC-FRA] for reprenting the French Olympic team, both could display exactly the same flag (and [MQ] could as well display the same flag or the cultural regional flag, becayuse here there's no other qualifier to say which one to use, and both are valid ; but if only the official national flag used in UN must be used then [-UN-MQ] will only display the tricolor flag, and if needed a versioning sufix could be used) The syntax could be similar to the syntax developed for language tags (or locale tags). 2013/8/5 Christopher Fynn <[email protected]> > On 05/08/2013, Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The way I perceive the regional indicators (in Uncode 6.0), they are > > absolutely not used and will be never used at all as long as there are no > > complements such as the minimum brackets I suggest to fix them. The 26 > > letter-like characters are basically broken in their identity, you can't > > safely align multiple flags or delimit them with break iterators, like > you > > can break words, paragraphs, syllables (in some languages this is > difficult > > as it is contextual too, but not impossible, and in many languages you > can > > find syllabel breaks without having to parse backward on indefinite > length) > > or lines. > > See: > > http://www.unicode.org/review/pri215/pri215-background.html > > http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12284r3-reg-indicator-seg.pdf >
