Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Philippe's core argument is that geopolitical entities and flags (as a specific instances of a design, in the heraldic sense) are disjoint. And that using geopolitical codes to refer to these designs is inherently unstable.
On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 at 13:26 Philippe Verdy <verd...@wanadoo.fr> wrote: > It was not just about it but on the fact that nothing is solved and for > things that Unicode does not want to support, there should be a better way > using existing standards to bind some object with semantics taken from a > blind but easily parsable object (here an URI ,without the need to reinvent > a way to encode it, just a plain URI just surrounded by a couple of > controls). No need then to describe what will be in that URI, it will just > need to be interpreted as a unique indentifier within some namespace. > With that it will be possible to create catalogs and standardize a few of > them. The system will not be limited to geopolitical entities. And nobody > will need to support all the namespaces or even to perform any external > query to some rogue server delivering malicious content. The URI could > still embed a small image using the "data:" URI scheme. > Also I criticize the fact of using RIS to decribe a "standard" feature in > the UCS, when they will be bound to unstable ISO standards which are > already politically biased. RIS was a bad choice the way it was specified, > and even its specification does not fully conforms to these ISO standards. > > 2015-07-02 14:05 GMT+02:00 Mark Davis ☕️ <m...@macchiato.com>: > >> Ok. I wasn't clear enough. Certainly boundaries are political and >> relevant, as is the fact that they change. What is not relevant is talking >> about particular country's motivations and actions. >> >> Moreover, you insist about writing a tome about this. In other words, >> TL;DR. >> >> Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis> >> >> *— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —* >> >> On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Philippe Verdy <verd...@wanadoo.fr> >> wrote: >> >>> The political subject is immediately related to the designation of flags >>> and their association to ISO 3166-1 and -2 encoded entities. Even if you >>> don't like it, this is very political and for a standard seeking for >>> stability, I wonder how any flag (directly bound to specific political >>> entities at specific dates and within some boundaries which may be >>> contested) can be related to ISO 3166 and its instability (and the fact >>> that ISO 3166 entities have in fact also no defined borders, so that ISO >>> 3166-2 is just a political point of view from the current ruler of the >>> current ISO 3166-1 entity). >>> >>> All this topic is political. In fact the real flags are not even encoded >>> with RIS, not even for current nations (and there's still a problem to know >>> what is a recognized nation, even when just considering the UN definition. >>> Political entities are defined but with fuzzy borders, they just represent >>> in fact some local governments, not necessarily their lands, people, or >>> cultures, and in some cases they are in exil or not even ruling: their seat >>> in the UN is vacant and they exist only on the paper, but even UN members >>> disagree about which treaty they recognize). >>> >> ... >> >> > >