- From: Ave Wrigley <ave.wrigley@itn.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 17:37:29 +0100
> > Have you considered defining language / country / currency inputs as > > part of Web Forms 2.0? Especially country codes - I don't know how > > many > > times I have seen different implementations of country selectors on > > web > > forms. It would be good to abstact this away, especially as it > > centralises the maintenance of the list of countries. > > Unfortunately, official lists of languages, country codes, and currency > inputs often do not keep up to date fast enough for use in applications. > It is also common for applications to have different requirements in > terms of which countries, languages, currencies to display. > > Thus it seems that it would be impractical to have a predefined list > like this. > > Thanks for your input, though! Although these lists are predefined, they are also updated regularly; take ISO 3166, (19 times since 3166-1 in 1997). I think this is pretty widely recognised as a difinitive list of countries - in fact it is what two letter top level domains are based on. It is also very widely used anyway in web forms, with the two or three letter code being used as the value for the option elements corresponding to each country. Of course, if you wish to still construct country lists by hand, there is nothing to stop you (if, for example, you want to bring certain countries to the top of an alphabetical list). This just provides an opportunity for developers to offer this common control without having to construct and maintain list of countries, and for browsers to do smart stuff like optionally preselecting countries from a list based on browser configuration / user options / etc. Ave. -- Ave Wrigley, Head of Development, ITN New Media 200 Grays Inn Rd, Tel: +44-20-7430-4719 London WC1X 8XZ, Mob: +44-7713-986247 United Kingdom mailto:ave.wrigley at itn.co.uk
Received on Wednesday, 18 August 2004 09:37:29 UTC