historic moment ?

March 2, 2009 6:28 PM

has scotland finally featured as a country in drop down menus ?

i stumbled upon this today - if you access the drop down menu, it actually features scotland rather than the uk, this is not something that i have ever noticed before - is this a new occurence or is it just a kind of two small countries helping each other out kind of thing ?

have we really seen a historic moment in the history of the internet ?
I've never seen scotland recognised as an independent country before, oh how it irked me.

posted by sgt.serenity to computers & internet (8 comments total)

you have to click the calculate the shipping tag for the historically historical internet name goodness.
posted by sgt.serenity at 6:30 PM on March 2

well, is says Scotland (U.K), Wales is also listed with a (U.K), I'm guessing it is not so much as a "huzzah a new country" as it is a "where in the British Isles is this going to"?
posted by edgeways at 6:38 PM on March 2

Well, it does include regions of staggering obscurity, such as Wallis and Futuna and other regions within larger states, such as San Marino and Lesotho, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
posted by Kattullus at 6:40 PM on March 2

Yup, right up there with Yap, Kosrae, and Norfolk Island.

Seriously, it's just a shipping form, and they probably use a standard template supplied by somebody else. Northern Ireland has different shipping costs, but mainland UK has exactly the same, so it's kinda pointless to split it down as they do. Ironically, were Scotland to achieve its rightful independence, shipping costs would probably go up.
posted by Sova at 6:41 PM on March 2

There's a slight weirdness in UK postal addresses, in which the constituent home nation (England, Scotland, etc.) is the preferred 'country' that you put at the end of the address, rather than "Great Britain" or "United Kingdom". USPS treats it a bit differently -- it's "Scotland (Great Britain and Northern Ireland)" but there you go.

This was the case before devolution, and has been for as long as I can remember.
posted by holgate at 7:00 PM on March 2

right up there with Yap, Kosrae...

Yap and Kosrae, along with Truk and Pohnpei (also in the menu) are the constituent states of the FSM, not totally independent political entities.

Their inclusion, and Scotland's, is a logistical statement, not a political one.

Weird they have the more contemporary spelling of Pohnpei (versus Ponape), but use the older Truk rather than Chuuk.
posted by univac at 10:18 PM on March 2

And it's terrible usability too, since most of us in the UK will look for the UK in the list first, then perhaps Great Britain if we can't find the UK, and only then would we look for England, Wales or Scotland.
posted by iivix at 1:57 AM on March 3

> regions within larger states, such as San Marino and Lesotho

I don't know much about San Marino, but Lesotho is a sovereign state, a constitutional monarchy in fact. Just because it's geographically surrounded by South Africa doesn't mean it's not independent.

You've never seen "Cry Freedom"?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:57 AM on March 3