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

[Ave Wrigley]

> Was there a concrete proposal that degrades sensibly? I suppose you
> could do something like: 
> 
> 
> <select .. type="iso3166-2"> <option value="en">England <option
> value="fr">France ... 
> 
> 
> Then, I suppose a client that was aware of the 'type="iso3166-2"'
> format could replace the contents of the <select> with a list of its
> own. If the page author provided a list item that the UA wasn't aware
> of, the UA could leave that in the list, meaning that all the options
> provided by the server would be included in the list. One advantage of
> this is that the language/country names could be replaced with
> versions in the user's native language. 
> 
> 
> However, this really changes the semantics to <select editable>, which
> means that the server would have to be able to sensibly deal with
> 'unknown' values. Plus, in this case, there's no way for the server to
> restrict entries to ones it can deal with (what if your web site can
> only provide an interface in English, French, and Spanish - do you use
> a typed list or not?). And if you don't augment the list with new
> entries, I don't really see the benefit. 
> 
> 
> Hmm, maybe it's better to let the site operator decide when they can
> accept new options. 

If I recall correctly ... your concrete proposal is pretty close to the
one I proposed earlier. I guess the simplest approach would be for the
UA (if it supports iso selects) to ignore any options specified, and
replace them with the appropriate options. I think trying to merge the
two lists might get a bit complicated. I like the idea that a UA could
localize the list of country name - another advantage! I think when you
are using this control the server _has_ to be able to deal with unknown
values (whether you provide a degradable list or not) - but in most cases
I guess this shouldn't present a problem.

Ave.

-- 
Ave Wrigley, Head of Development, ITN New Media
200 Grays Inn Rd, Tel: +44-20-7430-4719
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