[whatwg] ISO 639 / ISO 3166 / ISO 4217 inputs

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Ave Wrigley wrote:
> 
> Although these lists are predefined, they are also updated regularly; 
> take ISO 3166, (19 times since 3166-1 in 1997). I think this is pretty 
> widely recognised as a difinitive list of countries - in fact it is what 
> two letter top level domains are based on.

The problem is that even if the list is updated, the UAs aren't. If this 
had been done from the start, people using IE2 would have ancient country 
lists, and there would be little that page authors could do about it.

I agree it would be nice, I'm just not convinced it's workable.

Also, note that vendors typically want to stay WELL away from specifying 
stuff like this. Microsoft got in serious trouble when they drew a map for 
the timezone selector -- based on UN data! -- of countries near India, and 
got disputed regions... "wrong".

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'