> Here in Italy there are at least three kinds that are fairly common.
Well, one of them is the Europlug (the "small" 2-pin variant) and that works everywhere in EU except UK.
The problem is that the two grounded versions are peculiar to Italy and not the standard ISO ones. Italy lost its chance to switch to the ISO sockets (compatible with the Europlug) sometimes in the 90s, when the EU forced the adoption of 230V (+-10V) from the previous 220V. The legislator failed to force the use of the ISO grounded plug and now it is not uncommon to see in Italy sockets that are compatible with Europlug, the 2 Italian grounded kinds of plugs, Schuko and type C. It is obvious that these sockets are both clumsy and expensive.
As somewhat of a neutral observer, I think the 3 pin Italian sockets are actually quite nice: it's easy to put a lot of them in a power strip, and they are a lot less big and clunky than the Schuko ones.
I think day to day integration of voltages is worse. Not so much for gadgets since we have transformers for everything down to 5 volts, but anything else is a nightmare.
Ok, so it has gotten a little better, but having lived in close proximity to Americans in Africa and so buying their appliances second hand, etc, there were all to many cases of people accidentally switching plugs. PC Power supplies used to also be manually switcheable - no autodetect (atleast the ones we had access to in Africa), guessing that's changed.
The dangerous examples were cords that didn't have the right end or had changed ends so that you could hook a 110V appliance to a 220 outlet.
Never cared about this svg file format, but how does it work? If I make a reload on the link the countries are drawn individually as the file is loaded (relatively slow network connection). Like a puzzle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets
Here in Italy there are at least three kinds that are fairly common. Go north to Austria, and things change and you have to buy more adapters.