I wrote: > I hear Asmus's concern about using WAVING WHITE FLAG as the base > character for emoji flags which might not be depicted as waving.
I suppose there's no particular reason why U+2690 can't be the base character instead. But then Garth Wallace <gwalla at gmail dot com> wrote: > I'm concerned that the proposed base is a white flag, which usually > means "surrender". It seems like there's some potential for > miscommunication there. If the intrinsic meaning of the base character in isolation is a problem -- people using flag-tag-unaware systems will see a white flag and assume it means "surrender" -- then there aren't any existing encoded flag characters that are any better. Black flags have historically had a wide variety of meanings as well -- mourning, anarchy, Italian fascism, race car driver disqualified, etc. So substituting U+1F3F4 or U+2691 won't help. All of the other existing flag symbol characters have even more specific meanings, usually annotated in TUS. Folks who consider this a problem are probably intrigued by item 2 under "Discussion" in the background document: encode an all-new base character. This would delay the rollout of the mechanism, and if the new character has a glyph that looks at all like a flag, it will likely face the same criticism (e.g. "looks too much like the Portuguese flag"). -- Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
