Comment by roryirvine
7 months 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.
There are non GB UK countries though, or at least one in NI.
Right, 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.
Pet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.
1 reply →
At 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.
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Makes sense, also in keeping with the excessively complicated naming that thousands of years of dispute produces.
.im
The 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