views:

174

answers:

1

See also Dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles.

In a nut: Curaçao and Sint Maarten become autonomous and the remnant of the islands (the BES islands) become special municipalities of the Netherlands.

The question is: how should we replace Netherlands Antilles (with country code ISO-3166-2:AN) in the country dropdown of the average webapplication? I can't find any information about the new country codes. Do we have to add Curaçao and Sint Maarten to the dropdown with the country code AN? How about the BES islands?

+3  A: 

Neither, as yet, have ISO codes assigned.

For some uses, considering it part of the Netherlands (NL) will serve, as they are constituent countries. Note that "constituent country" isn't a rock-solid distinction as such matters go, and it's quite common to e.g. consider the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a single unit in a context where one might also consider Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands as three separate units.

For others, encoding as "Former Netherlands Antilles" will serve.

For other uses, this would not be acceptable. My recommendation would be to use codes from the user-assigned area of ISO 3166 (AA, QM to QZ, XA to XZ, and ZZ, though you may wish to avoid those in common usage in public contexts), and reassign to the code assigned later, if that happens.

Note also, that it may be worth keeping Netherlands Antilles as an option in some cases, as Netherlands Antilles is obviously the place where some things happened in the past which may remain worth noting for some time to come (one reason why many complained that CS was re-assigned from Czechoslovakia to Serbia and Montenegro too soon, is that valid and useful data about Czechoslovakia was still in active use at the time).

Jon Hanna
Czechoslovakia split into Czech Republik and Slovakia, not Serbia and Montenegro (that's more south).
stevenvh
@stevenvh: Jon is saying that when Czechoslovakia split, the `CS` country code was reassigned to Serbia and Montenegro.
no
Sorry, my bad! :-(
stevenvh
@stevenvh, @no, yep that's what I was saying, and when that reassignment happened, some people still had "live" data about the things that had happened in Czechoslovakia, so the change caused issues. There was a move to increase the minimum wait period, and I think it succeeded, but can't recall with 100% certainty.
Jon Hanna