Re: Proposal recommendation to Wc3 implimentation

2014-04-07 18:55, Mark Webley wrote:
> I have a proposal if we could also add a type="country" because it is 
> a popular and well needed and well used functionality
> used on many site and apps.

Undoubtedly it is fairly common, and we could present a good argument in 
favor of it: most country selection controls are faulty one way or 
another (e.g., missing new countries and displaying countries that have 
ceased to exist, or wrong names), and the quality might be improved, if 
they were based on native controls in browsers, updated frequently.

But I'm afraid the counterarguments are too strong. Implementing and 
maintaining a menu of about 200 countries, with their names in hundreds 
of different languages, would be a major effort, even though the Unicode 
CLDR has a relatively good basis for the localization information. 
Moreover, there are considerable differences in opinions on what the 
countries are. (Think about Taiwan, Northern Cyprus, and Transnistria. 
Few browser vendors would like to take the blame for setting up a list 
of countries.)

> This would be a country dropdown list.

That would not be wise. If the idea were adopted, it should not specify 
implementation. In fact, a dropdown of countries has very poor 
usability. A graphic interface (clickable map) might be an option, but 
normally the best approach is probably text input with recognition (so 
that you can mostly type just the first few letters of the country name).

>
> Let the country list lang also be determined by the page lang="" 
> language attribute.

The current approach in HTML5 is that localization is left to browsers, 
and the reality is that they do it poorly. The appropriate localization 
would be that the language of the element be used, but HTML5 does not 
generally impose such a requirement, or even recommendation, on other 
input types.

Note that you can use <input type=text name=country> (for country code 
input) or <input type=text name=country-name> (for localized country 
name input), expecting browsers to auto-fill the field with some data 
that the user previously entered in a similar field. The names "country" 
and "country-name" were suggested  in the previous HTML5 CR but dropped 
from the current one, presumably due to lack of implementations. But the 
suggestions as a whole make sense, and thet may well be taken to some 
future version of W3C HTML - and they have been retained in the "WHATWG 
Living Standard" for HTML, at
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/association-of-controls-and-forms.html#autofilling-form-controls:-the-autocomplete-attribute

>
> Another proposal is to add to html5 form types or tag types basic: 
> piecharts, bar charts and basic plotters.

I'm having some difficulties in seeing that as a serious suggestion. The 
suggestion about type=country is much more reasonable.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 7 April 2014 21:33:17 UTC