More American exceptionalism

I've been working on a long-overdue update to Weather Now's gazetteer, the database of places that allows people to find their weather. The app uses mainly US government data for geographic names and locations, but also some international sources. This matters because the US government has a thing called "Geopolitical Entities and Codes (GEC)," which superseded Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) publication 10-4. Everyone else in the world use International Standards Organization publication ISO-3166 for country codes, which also doesn't have any of the same identifiers for places smaller than countries that the FIPS and GEC standards to.

Unfortunately, even though the US adopted an updated standard (FIPS 104-1), it doesn't exactly match ISO-3166.

This has caused a bit of extra work to refactor my import code to use both GEC and ISO identifiers for countries—plus the old FIPS 10-4 codes. The geographic data sets I'm going to add to Weather Now in the next couple of weeks use random assortments of the three standards.

All this just means that I have to do several hours more work than I anticipated before I can start importing other sources. But first up, when I do, will be the United States Geological Survey list of about a million places. That will make searching for weather in the US a lot more effective.

Don't get me started on US-based web sites which assume that everyone uses US-style addresses or US-style telephone numbers!

That's just bad UX. _You_ shouldn't get _me_ started on the Commonwealth's efforts to make the English language even more confusing, with archaic French words like "colour" and "centre".