First Issues abbreviations

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Category Abbreviations

Country Categories: Africa since independence - Asia - Caribbean - Central and North America - Europe - Middle East - Oceania - Plebiscites - South America

Colonies, States, Occupation, Offices etc.: Argentina - Austria - Belgium - China - Colombia - Denmark - Ecuador - Finland - France - Germany - Great Britain - Greece - Hungary - India - Italy - Japan - Lithuania - Malaya - Netherlands - Nicaragua - Peru - Poland - Portugal - Romania - Russia - Serbia - Spain - Switzerland - Turkey - US Entities - UN - Venezuela - World Firsts

As noted in the blog on 19th June 2016,

I have been giving some thought to catagory abbreviations. These are now being added to the catalgue pages and they need to be as short as meaningfully possible to minimise column width. I am thinking of limiting them to three characters and adding some significance by capitalisation. This is still WIP, but so far,

Continents are not a problem. They will begin with a capital letter, e.g. Eur, Afr
For GB colonies, French Offices and so on, perhaps two lower case letters for the country and one capital letter for the type, so gbC and frO. That will probably cover most requirements.
Others, such as Plebescite and UN can be considered when needed.

In another blog dated 31st May 16, I have … paused to categorise all of the FICC catalogue so that (fingers crossed) I do not have to renumber Europe again. This has thrown up some difficulties I will have to address:

some areas of Europe in the reorganisations after WW1 and WW2. The former will require a category of Plebescites
Pacific islands from around the 1950s onwards
The West Indies, moving out of empire into commonwealth
Africa - it was clear from the outset that the Independencies of the 1960s would be troublesome
I expect there are others [United Nations]

red

Looking at the current list,

Continents:
Afr, Asi, CNA, MEa or MiE, Eur, SAm

Colonies:
arP Argentinian Provincial Issues,
auP, auT, auO - this is already looking a bit ugly. For Austria we have Possessions, Austrian Territories acquired by Italy and Austro-Hungarian offices abroad.To me, that should be Austrian Possessions, Occupied Austria and Austrian Offices, or auP, auO, auO. The capitalisation looks ugly and there are going to be many problems with counties that have both occupation issues and offices abroud. Perhaps I should opt for a three letter country abbreviation and just alter the hyperlink to go to different places. That's favourite for now. I'll give it further thought.

26Jun16 Further thoughts. Country abbreviation of 2 lower case chars = xy
Type = 1 capital: occupation = O; office abroad = A; state = S; Possession; Colony etc.
Some examples:
British colony gbC
Swiss state swS
German occupation geO
French office abroad frA
Mongolian Province moP

That will do for now.

Page created 19 Jun 2016

Page updated 19 Jun 2016