The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has released a new version of UN/LOCODE, and their Secretariat Note document is just as clueless as ever about character set usage in international standards:
"Place names in UN/LOCODE are given in their national language versions as expressed in the Roman alphabet using the 26 characters of the character set adopted for international trade data interchange, with diacritic signs, when practicable (cf. Paragraph 3.2.2 [sic; should be 3.3.2] of the UN/LOCODE Manual). International ISO Standard character sets are laid down in ISO 8859-1 (1987) and ISO10646-1 (1993). (The standard United States character set (437), which conforms to these ISO standards, is also widely used in trade data interchange)." It's 2012. How does one get through to folks like this? I tried writing to them a few years ago, but I don't think they were impressed by an individual contribution. http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/welcome.html -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
