Extra bonus fun: Concur, everybody's favorite corporate flight booking engine, shows both Sydney, Nova Scotia and Sydney, New South Wales as "Sydney, NS" in the destination selection dropdown.
Can concur, I live in Sydney, NSW and have made the mistake in concur myself. Fortunately just for listing the city I had a meal in, not for booking a flight.
A lot of smaller platforms I've worked with, before address validation became a standard library to pull in, would have a two character field for state if they were developed in the USA. Most things developed outside the USA tend to put no limit on it.
For Concur I think it was built on top of the limitations of the global platforms most airlines use that were designed a long time ago for mainframes that didn't have a lot of memory. (There was something about dates once...).
Working on platforms built for industries that relied so heavily on mainframes reminds me of the apocryphal story that the space shuttle was the size it was because it parts had to travel on railways that were built to a standard size that matched horse drawn wagons which were built to a standard size for two horses abreast. Or to summarise, the size of the space shuttle was determined by two horses arses...
At one point there was an ISO standard for Australian state and territory abbreviations that used two digits. According to that standard, NSW was NS. Unfortunately, since ISO charges six arms and three legs for a standard, businesses can sometimes run on stupid standards that are decades out of date.
My mother saw her return ticket was heading to Melbourne VI and assumed it meant gate 6 at Melbourne airport. It didn't. Fortunately there's no real significance to the return gate at Melbourne airport for an international flight, so it didn't affect me picking her up.
Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time.
I mean if we ever get more than 17576 airports in the world, there will be a problem with the three-letter airport codes because every system built in the past 50 years will be using that.
Fixing, replacing or modernizing something like that becomes a feat of archeology. I mean the codebase I work in is from 2012 and it's already got a high rate of wtf/sec (the incompetence of my predecessor didn't help there)
> Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time.
There was a story by a man named Amr whose name could never survive a trip through airline booking systems that encode the gender in the given name field: "SMITH/JOHNMR". His name would always come back as A.
There's a similar effect with the initials D R, M R or M S.
In Britain, including a dot after abbreviations is a bit dated — it's UK, USA, NASA, JG Smith Motors Ltd, Mr Jones etc. (American usage seems mixed; I sometimes see "USA" and "U.K." in the same sentence.)
That means "Dr Jones", "DR JONES" and "D R JONES" are particularly easy to confuse.
Canadian provinces and territories also use standard 2 letter abbreviations, which makes things work better with the US postal and addressing system. BC, AB, SK, MB, ON, QC, etc.
We had a chat about that on HN just the other day. It's cheaper to hack something together based on the world around you than it is to pay ISO a bucket of money to read one standard.
If you check the link you linked, you'll see that until 2004 the codes were indeed NS for NSW, VI for Vic, TS for Tas and QL for Qld. If you bought the standard for an arm and a leg in 2003, why would you buy the update for two arms and three legs in 2004? It's not like there's been any new states in Australia ever.
Interesting. I only first used these ISO labels around 2011, so the two letter versions for Australia never hit me. However, having grown up in NSW, i can attest that it’s never been a two letter abbreviation in common language. Likely the standard was mass produced and “corrected” for ambiguity later, that’s my guess anyway.
There’s like a daily flamewar on avherald. They even have a faq entry for this:
Q: Why do you use "wrong" abbreviations (e.g. for New South Wales)?
We use the original ISO 3166 standard (two letter code) to remain compatible with other sources. Therefore the abbreviation for e.g. New South Wales is NS unlike the postal abbreviation NSW.
