Newsgroups: ont.uucp
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Could someone explain this for me?
Message-ID: <1989Nov20.041149.21124@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Nov8.195924.29680@eci386.uucp> <89Nov9.144803est.2778@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <735@ecicrl.UUCP> <1989Nov19.202624.15502@sq.sq.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 89 04:11:49 GMT

In article <1989Nov19.202624.15502@sq.sq.com> lee@sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) writes:
>What am I missing?  Why is Canada CA and not CAN...?

It boils down to "stupidity".  The problem is that there is an ISO
standard for two-character country codes, and some clot conceived the
idea of using codes (intended for use by machines) as names (intended
for use by humans) when the issue of naming national domains came up.
When the .ca domain first got registered, some of us said this was a
stupid idea, and pointed out the Canada/California problem, and were
ignored.

It's the same mentality that says that you ought to write "891119230823"
instead of "Sun Nov 19 18:08:23 EST 1989" because the former is an ISO
standard and easier for computers to understand.

I'm really very glad that U of T is toronto.edu; everybody knows what
*that* means.  (It's also utoronto.ca, but so many mailers choke on that
that it's simpler to just ignore it.)
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu