We have a practical case of #Unicode encoding of country flags causing problems.
To recap, flags are encoded as sequences of codepoints corresponding to letters in the country's ISO code (so, Polish flag is <flag-p> <flag-l>). There is no heed paid to their mutability over time.
The Syrian flag will at some point start being rendered differently. Then, all the previous statements about Assad's government that used the flag will start rendering as if they were about the rebels.
I'm sad at Unicode's failures to fully and immutably encode the meaning of whoever wrote the text (see Han unification for counterexample to "fully").
The thing that I complain about is that I can write a piece of text that, when rendered, has some meaning, and the rendering of that very same byte sequence (e.g. in message logs) later will convey a different meaning.
A text encoding can choose carefully how the symbols that can be encoded are defined, so that they won't be misused (as I suppose you'd call using regional-s regional-y to represent the Assad regime) in ways that will be unambiguous at one point in time and have unambiguously different meaning at another point in time.
@robryk If the intended meaning of a text is directly tied to a very specific rendering of that text instead of the underlying semantics (which is what Unicode deals with) then the bytes alone actually hold very little information. I understand that most people think of emoji as images instead of text, and that causes all kinds of UX issues, but the differences between these two types of data are crucial in cases like this.
@robryk Unicode can’t control what “🇸🇾” looks like just as they can’t control what “A” looks like. If an “A” with a pointy top means something different to you than an “A” with a rounded top then the only way to preserve your intended meaning is to include font data alongside the raw text, which is just infeasible for most purposes.
Also, thanks for making me look at https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Flags, which contains the following statement, which IMO is self-ridiculing:
> Although a pair of REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols is referred to as an emoji_flag_sequence, it really represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region.
@robryk if you are referring to a specific version of a flag, then it's best to use an image. Flag emojis can change overtime.
@enablelanguages I think that people would not consider e.g. the current German flag and Nazi German flag to be different versions of the same flag.
@robryk Well, the meaning of regional indicator sequences is “the entity that corresponds to this region code”. Little flag images are just the most common visual presentation for that, and flags are inherently not stable. Nothing much the text encoding can do about that.