What is "official" stroke order?

[klortho]

In another thread, Altair said:

"What is "Official"?

Although just about everyone has sense that each character has an "official" stroke order, I think this is not true. At various times and at various places, it seems that people have looked to different authorities. ...."

I've just spent the last couple of hours searching fruitlessly for any authoritative specifications of stroke orders, and have come up empty handed. There are plenty of secondary sources of information, web sites and software, but among all of them, I can't seem to find a solid reference to an authoritative source.

Of course, the fact that I'm doing all my searching in English is certainly limiting the scope of the results. Can anyone tell me what body or bodies, specifically on mainland China, define official stroke order.

Of course, I know it doesn't really matter, but for a few characters, there are conflicting definitions, and not knowing what is "official" is driving me bonkers.

[wai ming]

There was an interesting discussion about stroke order here, including a couple of links which you might find useful.

[klortho]

Thanks for the link, it was very interesting. I picked up three links from it, but only one of those, if I am right, is a "primary" source:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/character/ - this seems to be another of many, many online learning-chinese sites. Again, as far as I can tell, it provides no references as to where it gets it's stroke-order information.

http://www.zdic.net/ - an online Chinese to Chinese dictionary. Not sure where this comes from. The stroke order information is tricky to decipher, it's encoded numerically under the heading "笔顺编号", and

http://tinyurl.com/jtn7r - Taiwan Ministry of Education stroke-order book - this looks definitive.