Bruce Lilly scripsit: > If by international agreement, 'yz' becomes the designation > for that country, then it is rather silly to stick one's > fingers in one's ears and shout "NA-NA-NA-NA-NA I don't want > to hear you". Actually, 'yz' doesn't designate the country in the ISO standard, as I explained yesterday. Rather, it designates the *name* of the country, which is of course subject to change *without* international agreement. In RFC 1766/3066, we attempt to use it to designate the country, which requires some straining of the concept. > As I have pointed out, politicians change the definitions of time > zones frequently, and those who have to deal with time zone issues > have found a way to cope with such change without trying to declare > international standardization organizations irrelevant. Ah, but you kick the ball through your own goalposts here. The Olsen time zone system is excellent -- but it becomes so only by totally ignoring the customary names of time zones and inventing its own! (Thus U.S. Eastern time is named "America/New_York", e.g.) The customary names are carried only as time zone abbreviations such as "EST", which are not unique, are English-only, and most of which are also made up. (Countries with a single time zone generally don't bother with an official name for it, with some obvious exceptions.) > It's rather silly to change that correspondence simply because > a few people are piqued that international agreement has been > reached to change a few 2-letter codes. Not much of an international agreement, really. -- Samuel Johnson on playing the violin: John Cowan "Difficult do you call it, Sir? jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I wish it were impossible." http://www.ccil.org/~cowan _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf