[Servercert-wg] State or Province

[Ryan Sleevi]

On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 7:48 PM Tim Hollebeek via Servercert-wg <
servercert-wg at cabforum.org> wrote:

>
>
> It has come to my attention that the current baseline requirements are
> rather unclear about what is a valid state or province
> (subject:stateOrProvinceName [OID: 2.5.4.8]).  Lots of countries have what
> are effectively states or provinces, they just call them something else.
>
>
>
> In order to provide bright, clear lines that everyone can comply with, it
> would be useful to point to an existing standard, and ISO 3166-2 seems like
> just the thing to point to.  Hopefully the ISO folks have already figured
> out all the crazy, weird corner cases for us.
>

Perhaps we can find more inclusive language than 'crazy'? I think you've
certainly got it right with corner cases, and indeed, some of them are
weird to us non-experts. It's just a word that I suspect was overlooked (as
I myself often did), but worth perhaps drawing attention to.


> Does anyone have a good reason why stateOrProvinceName should NOT be
> required to comply with ISO 3166-2?  Other comments or concerns?
>

Could you define what you mean by "comply with"? Isn't that the crux of the
question being asked? 3166-2 maintains multiple levels of subdivision, some
hierarchical and some co-equal but different. An example of this may be
France, as captured at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:FR

I think you've got the right intent, but I think it's difficult to evaluate
the trade-offs without a little more definition as to the substance.
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