OK, just my two cents to this discussion:
ISO happens to be an international standard. Maybe (well, actually,
obviously) not accepted by everyone, but I think more than any other
standard. Not in the last place because the codes are used as domain
designations in the Internet. And most of us surf the Internet from
time to time, I gather.
Strange things _for us_ like DZ for Algeria, will be occurring in
other systems as well. It is just that ISO is the most based on the
local name of the country, and not on the English (or any other) name.
I must admit I always use lower case, and not upper case. Which is
wrong. Lower case is used for ISO language codes, and upper case for
country codes. I guess this habit crept in through copying the
Michael Donner lower case way of writing.
By the way: it is interesting that languages are not always connected
to countries in ISO. NL is the Netherlands, and nl is Dutch, but
Sweden is SE and Swedish is sv. Denmark is DK and Danish is da. The
Czech rep. is CZ, but the Czech language is cs. Quite rightly so, I
think: Swedish is spoken in Finland, Danish in Germany, Czech in
Austria etc.
And Dutch in Belgium and France, of course.
But leaving this all aside: the most important thing is that we
understand eachother. So why not using entire words, instead of
abbreviations?
But for abbreviations, I at least will continue to use the ISO ones.
So if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can check at the DIN
site that lists them all (see the bookmarks section).
FIPS is not familiar at all to me, and I think that goes for most
Europeans. In that respect, car registrations will do better.
And finally: isn't it nice to know that DZ stems from Al-Dzhazair??
Peter S.
-- In BoundaryPoint@y..., "granthutchison" <granthutchison@b...>
wrote:
> Jesper:
> > You wil learn the 2-digit country codes quick.
> Not if I'm used to FIPS, I won't. There are too many digraphs with
> different meanings in the two systems:
> AG Antigua/Algeria
> AU Australia/Austria
> BG Bulgaria/Bangladesh
> BH Bahrain/ Belize
> BN Brunei/Benin
> BY Belarus/BurundiAnd that's just the first two letters of the
> alphabet! After a time of trying to keep ISO and FIPS in your head
at
> once, you can feel your brain begin to soften and flow.
> Grant