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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

The Unicode Consortium has indicated they won't accept new flags as emoji.

https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509...

Given this, it's a sensible move; it won't be long before the available set no longer reflects the full set of countries.

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This is incorrect. Most flag emoji are based off of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2[0], which will continue to be updated. The Unicode Consortium’s decision to not accept new flags refers to flags outside that standard, like the pride flag or the flags of subnational regions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Related issue I hadn't thought of before: what happens if the flag is changed?

Suppose it partly depends if the unicode description is 'flag of the country blah' or blazon-style description of what it looks like.

Font vendors update their fonts, I'd guess.

Not great that a historical usage of the older flag would start rendering as the new one.

Maybe Unicode needs to incorporate a date into each glyph /s

The Afghan flag has this exact problem now. Plus the political issue of recognizing or not the Taliban government

Unicode supports alternate character styles and combining characters, they can be used to refer to specific flag "versions"

Flags don't even have their own codepoints. (Swedish flag emoji was stripped by HN when it was verbatim in the below)

    import unicodedata
    [unicodedata.name(c) for c in "\U0001f1f8\U0001f1ea"]
    ['REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S', 'REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER E']

That's mostly correct, but flags for countries with a recognised ISO country code will still be included, with I guess the most recent example being South Sudan.

One wonders what flags are next.

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