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I guessed that it would become the USSR flag (US -> SU), but apparently Unicode doesn't define that one! I wonder why. That would have been humorous.
by happytoexplain 5y ago
I guessed that it would become the USSR flag (US -> SU), but apparently Unicode doesn't define that one! I wonder why. That would have been humorous.
- chungy 5y agoUnicode doesn't define any flags, really. That's up to the font rendering on systems/libraries.
- happytoexplain 5y agoTrue, but Unicode explicitly defines "SU" as a deprecated combination, regardless of flags. Seems like they omit everything from the list of "no longer used" country codes, with some exceptions. I would think they would have no reason not to allow historical regions.
- ts4z 5y agoIIRC Unicode doesn't define country codes. It was a workaround for a political issue of which countries recognize which other countries. It would have been difficult to get the CN delegation to sign off on a list that contained TW, although there are probably others.
- andylynch 5y agoThere are many more than I realised - Wikipedia has a decent list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_limited_recognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_limited_...
- bloak 5y agoAs I understand it, there is no two-letter ISO code for the USSR because when they update the standard they remove countries that no longer exist. In at least one case they have reused a code point: CS has been both "Czechoslovakia" and "Serbia and Montenegro", neither of which currently exist. As a result, two-letter ISO codes are useless for many potential applications, such as, for example, recording which country a book was published in, unless you supplement them with a reference to a particular version of the standard. Is there a way of getting the Czechoslovakian flag as an emoji? And did Serbia and Montenegro get round to making a flag?
- happytoexplain 5y agoAh, I didn't realize they reused codes from ISO 3166-3. I figured, because they keep these regions around in their own set, that was some implication that the codes would not be reused.