FYI. This seems relevant to our work. And I believe
illustrates just how subject to change character
string code lists can be.
I note that while the numbers are not as expressive
perhaps for human readers, they are stable and work
reliably in software.
The numeric representation of the country identifier
is the only part that we rely on in canonical XML
markup based on the ASN.1 schema. Only the numeric
portion of an abstract value such as "ROM(642)"
need ever appear in the transfer syntax where there
is typically no human reader involved.
Perhaps we should consider that the characters to be
displayed or read by an application could be disjoint
from the value actually used for validation purposes.
That is, I might send you 642 and you might choose to
display "ROMANIA" or "ROM" or "ROU" or nothing based on
you own local copy of the characters that map to these
numeric values.
Not a perfect solution, just an idea for consideration.
Phil
