ISO 3166 (country codes) Maintenance Agency Web pages move

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

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/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+