[Esras]

Echoing a similar sentiment, so supporting legacy retro video game sprites are very important to ensure are in and never change, but including flags is not okay? I re-read the justification for it recently and it still doesn't hold water, because it felt like it boiled down to "It's hard."

I was thinking about how Minecraft has a system of components and layers that let you compose various flags on their banners. Obviously that's far, far simpler than country (and autonomous region, and county, and province, and and and) flags that can include text, symbols, and practically entire images. But I did wonder if there was some way that could be represented. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly well-versed enough in code points and their ilk to propose anything useful.

But, I am torn. Archival projects are important, too, and language evolves. These decisions will live for potentially hundreds or thousands (Linear A) of years, and interoperability in computing is important.

[lifthrasiir]

Flags are in Unicode, they are just encoded like "the flag of United States" instead of "seven horizontal stripes and a specific arrangement of 50 white stars in a top-left blue background". (And the flag of US changes, although it hadn't been for many decades.)

[Esras]

I was specifically referring to this: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...

[lifthrasiir]

In that case, the post clearly identifies the problem:

> Identities are fluid and unstoppable which makes mapping them to a formal unchanging universal character set incompatible.

If you really want to have identity flags encoded in spite of that, you don't really need Unicode's blessing. The pride flag is already not a single character anyway, it's U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+1F308 (white flag -- emoji force -- ZWJ -- rainbow) and you can always create new ZWJ sequences with your own font. Or you can make a font that automatically synthesizes flags from some ZWJ sequence pattern, which is no longer semantically valid but should be much more flexible. Once they got sufficiently popular, there is no other reason that your new ZWJ sequence(s) shouldn't go into Unicode per se.

Unicode's decision to not process non-country flag emoji proposals is because they are closely tied with (minority) groups and Unicode wasn't expected to do any resulting conflict resolution. If you can somehow resolve that problem in advance, then you should probably do that first and propose what you've done.