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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

While the goal and work of Unicode are admirable, I can't help but fear that they're setting themselves up for future problems. Take for example flag emojis [1]. At first it seems "just" complicated. But then it starts to become problematic: what happens when a country changes flags? What happens when a country ceases to exist? Or splits? Or merges into another? What about when there are flag disputes?

Imagine if Unicode has to start dealing with the temporal change that for example the Olson TZ database [2] has to!

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/06/quirks-and-limitations-of-e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

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This is already not an issue. Unicode doesn't assign a separate codepoint to any flag. Each flag is represented by a two character ISO code using regional indicator symbols (such as IN for Indian flag).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol

That's part of the point. Are we prepared to track those changes across time? What if there's an article written today with (Unicode Hong Kong flag) or (Unicode Crimean flag)? Those articles might mean to express something in a context where HK is a certain independent entity, or Crimea is Ukrainian. What if that article is displayed with a Chinese and Russian flag 10 years from now?

Technically they already have a flag dispute, over Taiwan, as I recall. Thankfully for the Unicode consortium they’ve managed to leave the implementation problems that causes to the vendors.

As someone who used to work in country list related things, the existence of Taiwan as a country flag codepoint at all would be an issue for China. China will complain if you include Taiwan, and Taiwan will complain if omitted, so it's not fun appeasing both sides.

I imagine so, but it exists.

Agreed, just pointing it out. In our system, we had to display 'Taiwan, Province of China' for the Chinese users, and 'Taiwan' to everyone else, though that was just UI and the backend treated it identically.

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