Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 15:45 +0100, Alan Burlison wrote:
>> My suggestion is that we replace this with an explicit country list.
>> Google likes http://schmidt.devlib.org/data/countries.txt, but I'm open
>> to other suggestions for a data source.
>
> Occasionally people get into nasty arguments about what is and isn't a
> country and demand additions or removals from such lists.
>
> To better deflect such arguments, I'd want to explicitly reference a
> document from an organization which is actually authoritative on the
> subject rather than an individual developer's personal website.
>
> My understanding (from watching the IETF and IANA dodge this question)
> is the best such authority is the ISO 3166 country code lists.
From the webpage I referred to:
A country or territory is in this list if at least one of the following
conditions apply:
1. It has an ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (two letter) country code.
2. It has a United Nations 3 digit numerical code.
3. It has a country code top level domain (ccTLD) that
1. exists or
2. existed in the past but is still in use.
The second reason is responsible for the USSR still being listed.
So I think the list I referred to is rigorous.
--
Alan Burlison
--
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