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

[Wrigley, Ave]

> > Yes - but it puts the requiremment to keep the data up to date in 
> > the
> > hands of the browser, rather than the application developer.
> 
> So if I don't upgrade my user agent to the latest from the
> vendor, I can't enter my country into your form?
>
> Do you really want to put vendors into the position of
> deciding just what to call the Malvinas Islands?  Or exactly 
> the status of palestine or the Gaza Strip.

No ... that is why it is specified as an ISO 3166. It should be a
requirement for browsers to be compliant to this standard. It shouldn't
be too difficult for browsers to centralize maintenance of this
compliance - easier probably than for every web from maintainer to do
independently. Possibly, it could be tied in to an ISO URL (like
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists
/iso_3166-1_xml_en.zip - especially if there were an uncomressed
version!).
 
> Then you get problems with do you want England and Wales or UK ?

Well, I guess we would have to leave that up to ISO (although if that
were the case we should have .gb rather than .uk domain - but that's
another story ;-).

> I don't really think this could be specified to be truly useful, and 
> most people will end up writing their own list anyway.

If people are not happy with ISO 3166, then they can write their own
list (as they do now!).

> I could be wrong, why not produce a more detailed proposal?

OK - this isn't exactly detailed, but hopefully it gives the idea! What
I had in mind was something along the lines of:

<select name="country_code" type="iso3166" />

Which would expand to:

<select name="country_code" >
<option value="AFG">AFGHANISTAN</option>
<option value="ALB">ALBANIA</option>
.
.
.
</select>

possibly you could have <select type="iso3166" pattern="^[A-Z]{3}$">,
<select type="iso3166" pattern="^[A-Z]{2}$"> and <select type="iso3166"
pattern="^[0-9]{3}$"> or some such to distinguish between 3-letter,
2-letter, and numeric codes.

Ave.
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