At 4:29 PM +0100 2/25/02, Otto Stolz wrote: >This policy is bound to fail, some day. As countries appear and vanish all >the time, ISO would run out of usable codes, sooner or later. Never say >"never", nor "permantent" :-) >
I see your point. However, I suspect there are cases where a country code is relevant even if the country is defunct. For example, I might want to indicate that a certain law was on the books of the USSR, back when there was a USSR, even though there no longer is one today. I agree that even three-letter codes are going to be insufficient for this purpose if we want them to have any plausible relationship to the country they designate. I wonder if we need a combination of number and year; e.g. YUG-2001 might designate the same entity as YUG-2002 but a very different entity than YUG-1984. Of course this assumes that countries don't change faster than annually. That might be a faulty assumption in the long run. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+