Talk:.at

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Why not .oe?

Why isn't Austria's (ie. "Oesterreich") top-level domain .oe? I am aware that this is a derivative of ISO3166, but then why is Austria's ISO3166 2-letter code OE (3-letter could be OES or OER).

I know that it's because it's from French "Autriche" in the face of the fact that "au" and "aus" were already reserved for Australia, as it is the only logical explanation, but why isn't Germany's ISO3166 abbreviation "ge" (en: Germany) or "al" or "am" (fr: Allemagne)? Germany received an abbreviation in its own language, but Austria didn't.

And that's true of a few countries. Examples: Spain - es/esp (España), Estonia - ee/est (Eesti), Iceland - is/isl (Island). Perhaps that's all, but still, you can see that these ISO codes were created from the names of the countries as they appear in original language, not in English or French.

Had the committee simply applied the most basic (perhaps the most intuitive to them) abbreviation taken from an English or French name and only if they couldn't find a suitable one did they apply a relevant one taken from the native language? That would explain why some codes are completely counter-intuitive to the people that are using it DAILY?

Of course, that applies to many other countries as well (for those that use the Latin alphabet).

My question is: why didn't anyone ask a country's native before assigning codes and is it possible to change them now?

That kind of mess is everywhere. Argentina used .gov.ar for government sites, even though "government" in Spanish is "gobierno". That caused a lot of confusion when a web address was given, for example, in the radio, and they always had to clarify the v vs b thing (both letters sound the same). Now they are in the process of migrating to .gob.ar. 200.68.94.105 (talk) 14:27, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]