[whatwg] Input type for phone numbers

James Graham jgraham at opera.com
Tue Mar 31 10:02:24 PDT 2009


Markus Ernst wrote:
> So, while e-mail addresses have a strictly defined format, this does not 
> apply to phone numbers. Internationalisation would be necessary to 
> validate them, and still it would be a hard task, as complete sets of 
> valid formats might not be available for every country.

FWIW I would imagine that the most useful aspect of <input type="tel"> 
or whatever would not be validation (because validation is hard) but 
would be better integration on mobile devices e.g. making the default 
action of the keypad be number keys, making phone numbers from the 
contacts list available, etc. (these were both pointed out already). 
Therefore whilst I totally recommend this feature be postponed for 
HTML6, I think it makes a lot of sense and that problems with validation 
are a red herring.


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