Hi Guys,
A friend of mind just sent me this, thought it would be of interest here 
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Thatâs⊠not how it works.
I sympathise with where this is coming from, and Iâve also wished for a Welsh flag emoji in the past, but the Unicode Consortium is not the right organisation to address that petition to â though I suppose one canât expect the man on the street to know the technical details.
To the best of my knowledge, the Unicode consortium specifically decided not to go down that tricky road and decide which flags to encode (whatâs a country and what isnât?).
What they did instead is to provide for 26 special codes corresponding to letters of the alphabet but which are intended for this kind of flag-emoji use.
Then those font providers who wish to have flag emojis can interpret sequences of those special codes that correspond to two-letter ISO 3166 country codes (which many may know from Internet domains, e.g. âDEâ for Germany or âSIâ for Slovenia) as flag symbols.
Which two-âletterâ sequences are interpreted as flags will then depend on the font provider â so, for example, Apple may ship their devices with a font that recognises a slightly different set of two-letter codes than Samsung on their devices. For example, one vendor may recognise the sequence corresponding to âAQâ and display the flag of Antarctica while another may say that âthatâs not a countryâ and not interpret that sequence as a flag. Or some might have a flag for Kosovo or Taiwan while others might say âthose arenât countries; theyâre part of Serbia and China, respectivelyâ.
As you can see, this is a tricky political area, and I donât fault the Unicode Consortium for wanting to stay out of the debate.
So this appeal should be directed either to the individual font creators (e.g. Apple) to recognise a custom sequence (e.g. one from âQMâ to âQZâ or âXAâ to âXZâ as those ranges are deliberately left free in the ISO-3166 standard and can be assigned any desired meaning by anyone â as long as sender and recipient agree) as âWalesâ, or it should be directed to the ISO 3166 standards body to provide Wales with an ISO 3166 two-letter code, after which the petitioners could then petition font vendors to recognise that abbreviation as a code for the Welsh flag. (Note that âCY, CM, CR, CUâ are all already taken, for Cyprus, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Cuba. âWLâ and âWSâ are also out but âWAâ is a theoretically possibility.)
As an additional note, England and Scotland similarly do not have flag emojis â because they also do not have an ISO 3166 country code. Nor, of course, do other non-internationally-recognised-state entities such as Basque Country, Kurdistan, California, Brittany, Cornwall, the American Southern States, SĂĄpmi (âLapplandâ), or the community of Esperanto speakers.
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Really? That sounds like the bad old days of codepages. Iâm staggered theyâd go that direction.
is the article about this, including a bit of background and links to source documents.
The alternative â encoding only those flags or symbols as Unicode characters that were already in use in the telephone character sets that were the basis for encoded emoji â would have resulted in exactly ten symbols: for China, Germany, Spain, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States.
I donât think that would have been better.
I can imagine that they would have preferred not to encode them at all (together with many if not most or all of the emoji), as they rather stretch Unicodeâs remit of faciliting text-based communication.
Iâm somewhat boggled. Thank you for the education.
Although I think thatâs a fairly weak argument, given things like:
Precisely. Hence my statement that most if not all emoji have only a weak argument for inclusion in Unicode â were it not for the criterion âencoded in existing character setsâ, I canât see how they would have a raison dâĂȘtre in Unicode.
Thank you for an interesting insight into this topic, Philip. It sounds like OSI may need to get ready for some adjustments soonâŠ
Interesting to see that while England and Scotland have no codes assigned, Isle of Man (IM), Guernsey (GG) and Jersey (JE) are there, as is Hong Kong (HK).
I wonder if steps were taken to have Cymru/Wales assigned an ISO-3166 code when the request for its own domain suffixes was made, do you know?
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And Gibraltar, and the British Virgin Islands, and various other parts that are not completely part of the United Kingdom in all international respects (e.g. customs/tolls, nationality/EU citizenship rules).
I donât know but I highly doubt it. Itâs possible that the odd layperson campaigned for it but I think that the people who are enough âin the knowâ technically to apply for a top-level domain (.cymru/.wales) also know (at least broadly) what the criteria for an ISO 3166 code are - some kind of internationally-recognised entity, not a subnational entity such as a US state or a UK constituent country.
That said, there are a handful of non-state entities with a code in that ISO 3166 space, especially âEUâ for the European Union. And a handful of codes got registered only for certain purposes such as special customs rules (I think AX for the Ă land Islands might fall under this â they belong to Finland but have internal autonomy and also other customs rules, I think).
So itâs not completely impossible for the ISO 3166 standards body to approve some new non-state code, but due to the can of worms such exceptions open I highly doubt this will happen anytime soon.
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Thanks Philip, there seems to be a high degree of arbitrariness in this area - and the situation will not get any better following Brexit, I think
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Looks like they might be listening after all !
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And I like the way this was proposed â not dreaming up new âcountry codesâ or special-casing Wales etc. specifically, but instead a proposal to extend âcountry flagsâ to âregion flagsâ which would be applicable for things such as federal subjects of Russia, US states, German states, Canadian provinces, etc.
We shall see whether this will get implemented and how soon.