<font face="times new roman,serif">There are dozens of ways to divide up into continents, with perfectly good reasons for this way or that.</font><div><font face="times new roman,serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman,serif">For cases like that, we've just found that its better to go with an accepted standard (the United Nations divisions, also used in BCP47 and many other standards), rather than an alternative which is arguably no better, and which just introduces gratuitous differences.<br clear="all">
</font><font face="'times new roman', serif"><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><div><span><br><hr></span></div></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px">
<a href="https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033" target="_blank">Mark</a></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><i><br></i></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px">
<i>— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —</i></div></font><div><div><font face="'times new roman', serif"><i><span style="font-style:normal"><i></i></span><i></i></i></font></div></div><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 3:22 AM, SM <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sm@resistor.net" target="_blank">sm@resistor.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">At 23:<a href="tel:30%2015-05-2012" value="+13015052012" target="_blank">30 15-05-2012</a>, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:<br>
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I firmly agree. Stability is far more important than fiddling with the identifier names.<br>
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Yes.<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
After all, the identifier names are really not for human consumption; they need translation for anything but English, and even for English need some tweaking. And if people want to have different groupings, that is easy to do. In CLDR, for example, we group according to the United Nations M.49 standard for continents and subcontinents. (Cf <a href="http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/territory_containment_un_m_49.html" target="_blank">http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-<u></u>tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/<u></u>territory_containment_un_m_49.<u></u>html</a>)<br>
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Some of the countries listed in Eastern Africa under M.49 are actually in another sub-continent in terms of political sub-continents. Greenland is part of North America and politically within Europe. Cyprus is categorized under Asia.<br>
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If a rule of the thumb was needed, it could be to pick the continent where people in the region think they are. It avoids the "how many continents are there" question.<br>
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Regards,<br>
-sm <br>
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