Hot take: ISO standards do not meaningfully matter to me, because an extremely impoverished, unbanked person cannot freely access their contents from a smartphone or library computer.
Therefore, I go out of my way to avoid referring to them or relying on them in anyway.
@soatok ISO standards are behind a fuckin paywall?
jesus christ
They're industrial standards. There's an underlying assumption that you're not going to be able to make use of them without massive amounts of capital equipment, and a further assumption that if you're not able to make use of them, they're probably not very interesting or relevant to you.
Maybe those assumptions are flawed. But they're at least not surprising.
@pmevzek Anyone can publish the list of country codes. The number of people who need the actual written text of the standard is vanishingly small (and mostly confined to the Maintenance Agency responsible for assigning the codes). The ISO 3166 MA publishes a free newsletter with new assignments, withdrawals, changes to names, etc.
Similarly, anyone can publish the dimensions of A4 paper. Only stationery makers and printer company quality departments need the actual ISO 216 standard.
@pmevzek The list of country codes is not the standard. The standard is the *process of maintaining* the list of country codes (which also included the initial list, once upon a time). This is different from, e.g., ISO/IEC 9945 where the content of the standard specifies the syntax and semantics of the Bourne shell language.
I committed FreeBSD's copy of the country-code data (/usr/share/misc/iso3166) 29 years ago, and it was readily available from other sources then.
Soatok Dreamseeker
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