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 | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | 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/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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