Subject: [xml2rfc] country designations and postcodes -- was: Re: postcode city order

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:13:36 +0200 (MESZ)

As mentioned in a previous thread on "postcode city order",
the declaration and rendering of <postal> elements in xml2rfc
is very U.S.-centric and should be improved for international use.
I'd very much appreciate the usage of a postal address format
based on international treaties, not U.S. specifics.

Below, I want to provide a bunch of quickly collected information
regarding this topic.

In Europe and other treaty nations, (nation-wide) postal codes
(a.k.a. delivery codes) and international country designations
(international postal codes, CEPT Codes) are combined (with a
delimiting hyphen in between) and placed in front of the city name,
e.g., as posted by Eliot Lear on 28 Feb 2012, 21:26:03 +0100 :

|  CH-8620 Wallisellen
|  Switzerland

When this preferred form of postal code is used but postal routing
through non-treaty nations with manual interpretation of addresses
(by humans) is not necessary (as is common for postage via air mail),
the spelled-out country name in the additional, trailing line of the
address as shown above is not needed:

|  CH-8620 Wallisellen

is sufficient for international postage.

(Note that, as with E.163 telephone numbers where the "+xx " country
prefix is not part of national dial strings, the postal "xx-" country
designation is usually not included in strictly intra-national postal
usage.)

Important:

The CEPT country identifiers are country designations with a varying
number of (uppercase-only) latin letters, _not_ ISO 3166 country codes.
These postal (CEPT) country identifiers are "borrowed by reference"
(in a similar way as the DNS uses ISO 3166-1 country codes for ccTLD
names) from the list of car country symbols -- a.k.a. international
"Distinguishing Signs" or "UN Vehicle Codes" --, as established by the
United Nation's Convention on Road Traffic
  (Geneva, 19 Sept 1949, Article 20 + Annex 4,  and updated
   Vienna, 8 Nov 1968, Article 37 + Annex 3 -- see
   http://www.iadc-club.net/DK4/iadc/pr2/eng_con.asp )

Hence, for car country identification as well as for postal addresses,
you have for instance the single-character codes:
   A -   Austria
   B -   Belgium
   C -   Cuba
   D -   Germany
   E -   Spain
   F -   France
   H -   Hungary
   I -   Italy
   J -   Japan
   L -   Luxembourg
   N -   Norway
   P -   Portugal
   S -   Sweden
   V -   Holy See (Vatican)
... and the three-character codes:
   EST - Estland
   FIN - Finland
   IRL - Ireland
   RSM - San Marino
   RUS - Russia
   SLO - Slovenia
... while yet other codes are the same as in ISO 3166-1, e.g.:
   CH -  Switzerland
   DK -  Denmark
   FL -  Liechtenstein
   GB -  U.K.
   GR -  Greece
   HR -  Croatia
   IL -  Israel
   IS -  Island
   MC -  Monaco
   NL -  Netherlands
   PL -  Poland
   UA -  Ukraine
... and still others are equal to the ISO 3166-2 3-letter codes.

See the Wikipedia article on car country symbols (in German):
  http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kfz-Nationalit%C3%A4tszeichen

A comprehensive resource on country code systems is:
  http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/codes/country.htm

For more, in-depth information on postal addressing, refer to the
Universal Postal Union (UPU.INT), e.g. at
  http://www.upu.int/en/activities/addressing/standards.html
(documents do not seem to be "readily available" at large).

Kind regards,
  Alfred.

-- 

+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
| TR-Sys Alfred Hoenes   |  Alfred Hoenes   Dipl.-Math., Dipl.-Phys.  |
| Gerlinger Strasse 12   |  Phone: (+49)7156/9635-0, Fax: -18         |
| D-71254  Ditzingen     |  E-Mail:  [email-masked]                     |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+