"If it's not an urgency issue, some people undoubtedly will put in on the back burner until it becomes an urgency issue again," Chambers said.
The postponement had little resonance in countries like Britain, Germany and Australia, where machine-readable passports were introduced in the 1980s and virtually everyone has them.
Again, citizens who got their passports at diplomatic posts abroad may still have old types, said Australian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Julie McDonald.
"The number is so small it was not seen as a big problem," she said.
Some countries on the US visa waiver list have special advantages. In Slovenia, a nation of two million that won independence from old Yugoslavia in 1991, all old-style passports have been phased out and replaced by machine-readable types.
"It helps that we have a small population when you have to introduce such changes," Interior Ministry spokesman Bojan Trnovski said.
Travelers who still enter the US with old-style passports can expect to get them stamped with a warning that they will no longer be considered valid after Oct. 26, 2004.
"That will be an added incentive and reminder and push to have all of our international partners and travelers meet this deadline," Asa Hutchinson, the US Homeland Security Department's undersecretary for border and transportation security, said this week.
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