...

The problem seems to stem from the fact that "IANA is not in the business of determining what is and what isn't a country". This is a factual statementmade by IANA.

The ISO3661 list containts codes that are not countries. This is a fact.

It is. However, IANA makes an assumption: country :== ISO.3166.entry. Period. Of course, IANA could be wrong indeed - Jon Postel is an engineer, not a law expert. OK - let's see what law experts from ISO have to say about that: http://www.iso.ch/infoe/agency/3166-1.htm I've found the following information: ISO 3166-1:1997 Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions -- Part 1: Country codes Maybe ISO is also wrong. Who knows ... ;) Regards, Beri .-------. | --+-- | Berislav Todorovic, B.Sc.E.E. | E-mail: BERI at etf.bg.ac.yu | /|\ Hostmaster of the YU TLD | |-(-+-)-| School of Electrical Engineering | Phone: (+381-11) 3221-419 | \|/ Bulevar Revolucije 73 | 3370-106 | --+-- | 11000 Belgrade SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA | Fax: (+381-11) 3248-681 `-------' -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------- Logged at Tue Sep 15 16:43:09 MET DST 1998 ---------