[whatwg] input type="country"?

[Martijn]

On 8/23/06, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> > David Håsäther wrote:
> >> But what if you use a browser with an old list, and your contry isn't
> >> listed. Or are you proposing that browsers download a list every time?
> >
> > Many modern browsers already periodically check for updates.  Such lists
> > could be downloaded like any other update, as required.
>
> But it seems like a rather onerous requirement to have in the spec for what
> would be a very minor feature. Also, having an application that may display and
> be expected to process different countries depending on the particular revision
> of the particular browser being used seems like a poor idea from both a UI and
> back-end point of view.

It's not something that would happen very often, and I don't think I
would encounter that problem at all.
The UI I get nowadays is already poor (webpages with a very long list
of countries in a select box), I would hope that a browser UI for
input type="country" would be better.

> How useful would this type of control actually be? How often do people really
> need to list every country in the world? The control would have no semantic
> value beyond a <select> since many more-specific country lists ("all the
> countries in Europe", "all the countries we sell to") would still be implemented
> as <select>s.

It's not used as often as the request for an email or name for
example, but it is asked pretty often, I think.

Regards,
Martijn

> --
> "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
>   -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
>