Subject: [Ltru] Re: Jersey JE and Guernsey GG Country Codes

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 21:58:30 -0700

Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

>> Hmmmm....
>>
>> I got this from the W3C site...
>
> Would you consult the French government to find out about traffic
> regulations in Wales? ISO 3166 is not maintained by W3C. I'm sure this
> was provided with good intentions to be helpful to users, but it's
> clearly a couple of years out of date -- it's been a while now since
> DIN gave up the role of MA.

In fairness, as much use as W3C makes of ISO standards, and as
rigorously as they keep their pages up to date, it seems reasonable to
assume that their pointer to ISO 3166/MA would be current.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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From: Robin Cover <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 08:46:19 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, Doug Ewell wrote:

[...] about W3C's not-current pointer to the ISO 3166/MA

[meta-level off topic comment]

As a website maintainer, I have a different perspective
on what's "reasonable." I create lots of pointers (links),
sometimes a hundred a day.  The half-life of a URL is about
40 days. The economic loss on a global scale from
highly-paid persons searching for resources occasioned by
now-broken links is incalculable.

What's reasonable is NOT that Party A fails to support link
persistence (by any number of standard HTTP-based mechanisms) --
expecting a million other users to stay vigilant and correct
the broken links or AWOL resources for which Party A is/was custodian.
What's reasonable is that ONE party fixes the URI with
a URI alias so that a million other users don't have to
edit all their documents.

In this case [ISO 3166/MA], the resource has moved, so DIN
should be redirecting all traffic to the resource at its
new location.  Requiring all others, thousands of them, to
detect and repair the intentional link damage is unreasonable.

The MA has sufficient identity that obsolete URLs
can be mapped to current ones, if the agencies
responsible for their resources (past and present)
do the right thing.

- Robin Cover

*PS  Peter, you should be proud of SIL.  My SGML/XML
resource has not been there for about 8 years.  Watch
this:

http://www.sil.org/sgml/yuriMemColl.html   OR this:
http://www.sil.org/sgml/sgmlnew.html

Dozens of such URLs printed in hundreds of books still work;
such pointers in the books cannot be maintained/fixed,
but URI owners can take responsibility for resources
committed into their charge.

"Cool URIs don't change"
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

-------------------

> assume that their pointer to ISO 3166/MA would be current.

and Peter said:

Whatever might *seem* reasonable, it is clear that their pointer is at
least a couple of years out of date.

--