IN ISO 3166-1, in the 3-digit numeric codes, the 900+-999 range is available for private use. Some of these are already "taken", i.e. in widespread use. I note that banking and financial services (ISO TC68) standardards for financial transactions do use the 3-digit numeric code because it is the most stable. Attached is a a document which may be of interest. Comments welcome on the proposed default conventions. With respect to pseudo-countries, one should note that near 25% of the entities in ISO 3166-1 are not "countries", i.e. UN member nation states. I will forward some information on this next week. I am involved in a JTC1/SC32/WG1 eBusiness standard pertaining to "jurisdictional domains". Here date/time referencing and localization requirements are importnat. regards - Jake Knoppers -----Original Message----- From: Clive D.W. Feather [mailto:clive@demon.net] Sent: June 11, 2004 1:40 AM To: Mark Davis Cc: Guy Harris; tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: Time Zone Localizations Mark Davis said:
Understood that Etc/GMT... don't correspond to countries. But in an API and for translation, it is useful to have everything attached to a country, even if it is a pseudo-country. That's why the suggestion in the document is to use ZZ for them, which is a private-use ISO country code, which can be translated as "no country".
I wouldn't use ZZ, because it's useful for AA and ZZ to lie outside the range of codes used. Rather, use one of the other private-use codes - isn't OO available? If I've misremembered that, then certainly QQ and QZ are. -- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive@demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8495 6138 Internet Expert | Home: <clive@davros.org> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937 Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646 Thus plc | |