From: msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader)
Subject: Re: domain questions
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 19:29:47 GMT

> > ... the convention of identifying countries with two-letter codes
> > ... certainly doesn't seem very user-friendly. Perhaps a concession to
> > some archaic database technology?

> Think about it. Would  *you* want to type .united_states or .netherlands or
> .australia at the end of an email address?

Particularly if you were *from* the Netherlands and therefore considered
that it should be .nederland?  By using the ISO 2-letter codes, we get
not only brevity, but also a system that all nations can agree on and
which at least theoretically is without bias.

I said theoretically; there are some surprises in there.  For instance;
Finland is named Suomi in its most-used national language, and yet it
has the code "fi".  But the country is called Finnland in Swedish, which
is also a national language there, so maybe this is a reason.  (Their car
registration stickers apparently use both languages; they say SF.)  And
then "su" was taken by the Soviet Union.  But that's another strange one;
there is no prominent "u" in Soyuz Sovyetskikh Sotsialistichestikh Res-
publik either.  My only guess is that because it was decided to use the
English alphabet for the codes, they decided to use the English name.

A third surprise is "gb" for the United Kingdom.  As you know, Great
Britain denotes the largest island in the British Isles, and is commonly
used to refer to the combination of the three divisions of the UK that
are each mostly on that island -- in other words to the UK minus Northern
Ireland.  The choice of "gb" therefore looks like a political statement,
but it is a curious one, for even if Northern Ireland did at some time
cease to be part of the UK, the term UK would presumably continue to
be correct.  As you also know, the email domain for the UK is in fact
"uk" and not "gb": a choice that I think is justified by practicality.

In addition to the ISO standard 2-letter code series, there is also a
3-letter code series.  Some of us whose countries' 2-letter codes are
misleading wish that the 3-letter series had been adopted.  For instance,
in Canada, the 2-letter abbreviations for the various US states are
widely seen; several of these conflict with the 2-letter country codes,
most notably "CA" for California which conflicts with "ca" for Canada!
Not helping matters is the fact that the standard abbreviation for
Canada in Canada (at least in English) is "Can." (well, our car-
registration stickers use "CDN"; perhaps someone didn't like the thought
of cars labeled "CAN"!), and the fact that "ca" for California is also
a domain... under the "us" domain.  But presumably if the 3-letter codes
had been used, other countries would have seen such problems, and there
would have been a slight loss of terseness.

Serious discussion of these issues should go to comp.std.internat.
I'm only an interested bystander and not an expert, so I do not
presume to attempt to redirect the thread.
-- 
Mark Brader, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com
	A standard is established on sure bases, not capriciously but with
	the surety of something intentional and of a logic controlled by
	analysis and experiment. ... A standard is necessary for order
	in human effort.				-- Le Corbusier

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