[OT] Are there tags for cities and towns anywhere please?

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Fri Nov 21 11:44:44 CET 2003


At 08:54 +0000 2003-11-21, William Overington wrote:
>I am writing to enquire as to whether there are tags for cities and 
>towns anywhere.

There are postal codes (but not in Ireland).

There are also the UN Location codes, called Locodes. See 
http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/main.htm

>If not, could such a list be started please?

Why?

>What would need to be done administratively and what would be the 
>best format for the codes?

File a New Work Item request with justification and draft with ISO TC46/WG2

>
>I am aware that various cities and towns have their names translated into
>local languages.  For example, the Italian city Firenze is localized into
>English as Florence, the English city of London is localized into French as
>Londres.  The German city of Mainz is localized unchanged into English, yet
>is localized into French.  Smaller cities and towns are often localized
>unchanged.
>
>The specific application which I have in mind is localization of
>pan-European weather information for localization on interactive television
>displays.  For example, a message which means in English, "It is snowing in
>London" would be broadcast as a Unicode Private Use Area character to
>indicate "It is snowing in (city or town)."

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO. A thousand times no.

Mr Overington.

If you want to make an alphabetic code to represent countries, 
cities, languages, trees, brands of beer, or anything else, fine. If 
you want to use that code to mark up data THEN USE THE BLEEDING LATIN 
ALPHABET TO DO SO.

All of us who KNOW something about Unicode have been telling you that 
your hare-brained schemes to use the PUA for this kind of thing are 
ill-conceived at best, and have been telling you this for a very long 
time.

Please do not waste anyone's time with another such scheme.

There may be merits in a scheme for tagging cities, towns, villages, 
hamlets, and other such entities. The correct place to discuss that 
is in TC46/WG2. For credibility I would suggest approaching them with 
a well-prepared draft, to include draft codes for at least all such 
entities with 50,000 or more residents. I suspect the list would be 
very long indeed.

Please do not further discuss this on the ietf-languages list. It is off-topic.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com


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