Splitting country codes
Doug Ewell
dewell at adelphia.net
Sun Apr 2 02:34:52 CEST 2006
Erik van der Poel <erikv at google dot com> wrote:
> It's great that the registry provides stable region codes (unlike ISO
> 3166). I think some organizations and individuals really welcome this
> aspect of the registry. It might be a good idea to think of the
> registry in a broader sense, i.e. not just for language tags, but also
> for region codes.
If other organizations or individuals want to use the registry for their
own needs, they are certainly free to do so; it's not as if we can
prevent them, or need to. I do think, however, there's a difference
between that and changing, or tailoring, or customizing the contents of
the registry to meet non-language-tagging needs.
Remember that ISO 3166 began as a coding system for the names of
countries, and then the codes were adopted as ccTLDs. That's great, and
the MA welcomes this usage, but when individuals and groups started
petitioning the MA for their own ISO 3166 country code so they could use
it as a ccTLD, the MA had to stop and say, no, that's not what the
standard is for.
Maintaining a history of which countries (and thus which country codes)
here merged and split over the years sounds like something the Common
Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project might be good at. It might be
worthwhile for groups that want to use the registry for a more general
purpose to consider using CLDR instead.
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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