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What's the deal with using the two-letter postal code abbreviations for states, instead of the longer, more formal abbreviations? That is, why write IN for Indiana instead of good old Ind.? A caller is annoyed by U.S. Postal Service abbreviations creeping into modern prose, and thinks they should be reserved for postal addresses.
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I, for one, hate the two-letter postal abbreviations and I never use them.
Anyway, they seem entirely inappropriate for an international medium like the Web. I have seen numerous discussions get derailed when Americans confuse non-American participants with postal abbreviations.
Furthermore, the postal abbreviations for states are entirely superfluous in terms of delivering the mail. Postal codes are already mandatory, and they are much more granular than state abbreviations.
A third thing that bothers me is the way that people misuse commas when using state abbreviations (although this also does happen when not abbreviating). As in --
I went to Ithaca, NY for the summer.
You can't use a single comma like that! This kind of usage tells you that you can break the sentence at the comma and that two principal elements of the sentence are "I went to Ithaca" and "New York for the summer." That makes no sense.
It should be --
I went to Ithaca, NY, for the summer.
That tells you that the "New York" part is an appositive or parenthetical and can be safely removed without harming the meaning of the sentence.
I don't call them abbreviations, altho the USPS now calls them that. In the US, they would be followed by a period if they were, and the second letter wouldn't be capitalized. I think they were originally called "identifiers."
You have a point about the comma after "NY," but I probably would leave it out and figure that it would be more understandable that way.
Not necessarily. If you type the first letter of the abbreviation (or any entry in a drop-down menu), it'll jump to the first entry that begins with that letter. Type the same letter again and it'll jump to the second, and so on.
Living in Arizona, I press "A" three or more times depending upon how many non-states (e.g., American Samoa) have been included in the list.
Look up the list of "old" state abbreviations, and you will find no consistent form. You may also find that you don't remember the old forms any more. Since the USPS has a standardized format, we might as well learn and use it. Admittedly, having lived in AL, AR, and AK, but not AZ, the ambiguity among them could become confusing.
I seem to remember there were also multiple "old" abbreviations for the same state. California was "Cal." and "Calif.", Pennsylvania was "Pa.", "Penn." and "Penna." (as in "Reg. Penna. Dept. Ag."), and if I'm not mistaken Washington was both "Wash." and "Wn."
It'd be nice to teach the old ones if there's time. If nothing else, there are the puns in the title cards of Warner Brothers' old cartoon "Porky's Snooze Reel".
On a sort of related topic...what about the 2-character ISO country codes?
In my work, I deal almost exclusively with countries outside the United States. When communicating with coworkers in email, I pretty much always use the ISO country codes instead of writing out the country names. As much as I need to refer to countries, I'd really rather type "PK, IN and TH" instead of "Pakistan, India and Thailand."
But that's only with colleagues who are involved in the projects and know what the country codes mean. The program we use uses the country codes so it's a common denominator. I would never use them in documentation for users or with non-project colleagues.
For the most part, you can kind of figure what the codes mean...except for Switzerland which is CH. Or Croatia which is HR. Or Algeria which is DZ. Ok, so maybe they aren't so figurable... 
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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