Thanks for summarising that in an email, Doug. I really wish they'd provided a justification for this statement! :) I guess that this is the right list for a UTC officer to give some sort of feedback.
On Sun, 28 Jun 2015 at 21:23 Doug Ewell <d...@ewellic.org> wrote: > Noah Slater wrote: > > > Sorry to be a pain. I mentioned I looked up the minutes and couldn't > > find anything apropos. > > > > Could someone explain the rational behind 134-C2 and how it might > > apply to the rainbow flag proposal ? > > The following is informal and dilettante, since only a UTC officer can > give a formal rationale for what happened in this 2013 meeting. > > According to the minutes, consensus decision 134-C2, by itself, says > only: "Consensus: The Unicode Technical Committee does not approve > encoding a United States flag symbol." That refers only to the one > symbol proposed in L2/12-094. > > But the same discussion also led to an action item, 134-A5: "Action Item > for Ken Whistler: Add the United States Flag symbol to notices of > non-approval." > > And that notice says, in full (not elided): > > "Disposition: The UTC rejected the proposal. The mapping to an existing > emoji symbol for the US flag is already possible by using pairs of > regional indicator symbols. Additionally, the domain of flags is > generally not amenable to representation by encoded characters, and the > UTC does not wish to entertain further proposals for encoding of symbol > characters for flags, whether national, state, regional, international, > or otherwise. References to UTC Minutes: [134-C2], January 28, 2013." > > The last clause is the relevant one here: "whether national, state, > regional, international, or otherwise." The words "or otherwise" could > be interpreted as saying that no *specific* flag of any kind will be > encoded in the future as a single character, partly because the domain > of flags is so open-ended. That would include flags associated with or > representing specific groups of individuals or social causes. > > Now, we know that this is all flexible and subject to momentary change. > Trying to predict what will and will not be considered "in scope" is > more difficult today than ever. Perhaps your best bet is simply to write > and submit a proposal, and see what happens. > > -- > Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸 > >
