4 ms·
.uk only exists because UKERNA was already using it (or, rather, UK.) for JANET's own X500-ish system that pre-dates the standardisation of DNS. At one point,
by roryirvine 2y ago
.uk only exists because UKERNA was already using it (or, rather, UK.) for JANET's own X500-ish system that pre-dates the standardisation of DNS.
At one point, it was intended that moving the UK's internet resources to .gb would be the final stage of the transition from the internal JANET system.
By the time I first heard about that in the early 90s, that had already gained legendary "that'll never happen" status - and, sure enough, the transition was declared complete when the last UK.AC.SITE <-> ac.uk mail gateways were retired circa 1996.
- anotherhue 2y agoThere are non GB UK countries though, or at least one in NI.
- ethbr1 2y ago.im
- jamesog 2y agoThe Isle of Man isn't part of the UK, but rather a Crown Dependency, as are Jersey (.je) and Guernsey (.gg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Dependencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Dependencies
- alexchamberlain 2y agoRight, but confusingly, GB is the ISO 2 code for the United Kingdom, even though the United Kingdom is much bigger than Great Britain, where the GB abbreviation comes from.
- anotherhue 2y agoMakes sense, also in keeping with the excessively complicated naming that thousands of years of dispute produces.
- vidarh 2y agoPet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.
- glimmung 2y agoThanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!
- beojan 2y agoAt least for the identification sticker / stripe on cars we've moved from GB to UK. Maybe we'll just move to uk as the ISO 2 letter code.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoIVR codes are not ISO 3166-1 codes. The ISO codes are all two letters; the IVR codes range from one to three letters.
- alexchamberlain 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20120616044022/http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166-faqs/iso_3166_faqs_specific.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120616044022/http://www.iso.or... Apparently "United" and "Kingdom" aren't valid for ISO, so they went with ignoring part of the name completely.
- xp84 2y agoThat’s interesting. It kind of makes sense. I guess the US makes this rule kind of funny too. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get .am for “America.”