2012/5/31 Asmus Freytag <asm...@ix.netcom.com>: > On 5/30/2012 10:15 PM, Doug Ewell wrote: > > A seemingly straightforward solution to the “unambiguous mapping” problem > would be to use the existing Plane 14 tag letters along with a new FLAG TAG, > say at U+E0002. Then <E0002, E0043, E0048> would unequivocally denote the > current Swiss flag. No need for separate lead and trail. Simple. > > ... What’s that? Oh, sorry, never mind. Deprecated. > > > Doug, > > you put your finger on it. Any form of combining scheme is doomed to fail. > > This includes the current approach of "Regional indicators".
You're wrong. The Régional indicators failed because they were encoded at the character level, so that their scope of effect was supposed to extended to arbitrary lengths of texts. Here it's just about how to represent a glyph (even if it's colored) locally representing a flag. The scope of the encoded substring will not go outside of this flag indicator, so it will work the same way as if this were encoded as ligatures. You can perfectly create a breaking rule that will aboid breaking the sequence of encoded characters representing the flag with its code. It can be handled perfectly as if it was an unbreakable word, surrounded by two punctuation marks (which will still be a valid fallback display method, in case of absence of the glyphs in fonts for this type of string). You can perfectly assign representative glyphs for the indididual characters (these glyphs don't have to represent any complete flag, just a part of a flag showing internally its code. In fact, all characters used will be treted as separate symbols (independantly of the fact that they *may* be ligatured to show the actual flag design. The encoding will provide a clear indication that substituting the list of default representative glyphs to an actual flag will be valid (it won't break the character identities, as long as there exists a registry describing the assigned flag codes, reencoded with these symbols). In other words, it avoids completely the need to encode directly any flag of any political entity (or with a naming convention applied in the vexillologist registry, for any other personal or organisational flag). It avoids all copyright issues and the problem of legal restriction of use of flags (including in some countries where some flags are prohibited).
