Subject: [Ltru] Re: 3166-1 state machine (was: Question)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 22:25:57 -0800

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

>> "Why they are reserved" is not important.  Either a code is
>> currently assigned, or it was formerly assigned, or it is
>> private-use ("user-assigned").  Distinctions between the
>> different types of "reserved" are of interest only to the MA.
>
> I'm not sure, if "transitionally reserved" is essentially the
> same as "deprecated", this could be relevant, and if all these
> other "reservations" hide what we're interested in here, i.e.
> "deprecated" vs. "unassigned", it could be also relevant.

We should apply the various ISO 3166 categories of "reserved" or
"unassigned" only if they help meet the real goal of allowing all codes
that have been in ISO 3166 since 1988, and disallowing all others.

Recall that the disallowed codes (withdrawn before 1988) would be BQ,
CT, DY, FQ, HV, JT, MI, NH, NQ, PC, PU, PZ, RH, VD, and WK.  All of
these are marked "unassigned," except for DY and RH, which are
"indeterminately reserved" due to their use in car codes.  In fact, as
seen earlier, RH is reserved because of its association with Haiti, not
Southern Rhodesia.

Also recall that the allowed codes (withdrawn after 1988) would be BU,
DD, FX, NT, SU, TP, YD, YU, and ZR.  All of these are "transitionally
reserved," except for DD and YD, which are simply "unassigned," and FX,
which is "exceptionally reserved."  The DD and YD cases seem odd because
both were withdrawn in 1990, a year later than BU, which is still
"transitionally reserved."  FX is a strange code to begin with, but its
status in the "exceptionally reserved" category makes things worse; that
category is a catch-all, and we learn nothing about FX by finding it
there.

These exceptions make me uncomfortable with relying on the ISO 3166
categories.

> And for Mark's "Joe Blow" or my "Jane Blog" anything on the
> 3166-1 web pages could be (ab)used.  Especially before 3066bis.
>
> If we don't have a copy of ISO 3166:1988, then Joe and Jane
> also have no copy, that's why they (ab)use ccTLDs or reserved
> codes.  Until the future 3066bis registry helps to catch such
> errors.

We're *talking* about the future 3066bis registry.  What people do with
3066 is out of scope for this group -- although I have to ask again, is
there really any evidence that people are using non-ISO 3166 ccTLDs in
language tags?

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 05:48:23 +0200

Doug Ewell wrote:

> is there really any evidence that people are using non-ISO
> 3166 ccTLDs in language tags?

For some time I thought that en-UK is correct... :-(  Maybe I
confuse it with a locale.  Google claims to have 300,000 hits
for "en-uk" (quoted), most of them probably irrelevant.  Bye.

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 05:48:23 +0200