Subject: Re: [BoundaryPoint] Xapitelako Harria - &gt; Basque enclaves etc.<br/>
Date: Mar 26, 2003 @ 14:29<br/>
Author: Kevin Meynell (Kevin Meynell &lt;kevin@...&gt;)<br/>
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<div id="ygrps-yiv-715831034"><blockquote><span title="ireply">&gt;of course if we tried to divine or create a fresh glyph for every wannabee <br/>
&gt;country in the world we might well run out of unreserved letter combinations<br/>
<br/>
 </span></blockquote>Of course, ISO 3166 is most useful for Internet TLDs these days and there <br/>
have been initiatives to create rTLDs (as opposed to gTLDs and ccTLDs) for <br/>
various ethnic and political groupings. Unfortunately, whilst regions with <br/>
recognised borders and administrations (e.g. Catalonia, Scotland and <br/>
Corsica) would be fairly easy to deal with, you have big problems when it <br/>
comes to regions that span one or more countries (e.g. Basque country) or <br/>
those with ill-demarcated boundaries (e.g. Kurdistan). The main problem is <br/>
that no single organisation speaks for those regions, which makes agreement <br/>
on even the most simple things (e.g. what identifiers to use) impossible. <br/>
It shouldn&#39;t be forgotten that it took nearly 20 years to compile ISO 3166, <br/>
and that was dealing with recognised governments!<br/>
<br/>
Incidentally, .eu is likely to the first example of an &#39;rTLD&#39;, even though <br/>
this nomenclature is not formally used.<br/>
<br/>
Regards,<br/>
<br/>
Kevin Meynell</div>