I have my doubts as to whether a generic solution solves this.<p>The author notes some issues, like using it for place of birth. Now you need a temporal list for "countries that existed in year XYZ".<p>There are similar issues for shipping. Not everyone ships everywhere. If the list is abstract and unknown to me, how do I whitelist/blacklist? Am I supposed to know that Scotland exists in the list or not? What if it's for a passport input? Does Scotland have it's own passport? How do I deal with Taiwan without pissing off Chinese web site visitors?<p>Tldr: The list depends on context. I'm skeptical that a centralized list could deal with commonly used contexts.
There was an excellent article[0] in Smashing Magazine several years ago that dealt with some of the complexities of country selectors.<p>For someone who lives in the UK, you never know whether a list will have United Kingdom, Great Britain or England in it (I've come across all three), and similar problems exist for countries that are known by more than one name (eg Netherlands vs Holland).<p>And some sites break sorting by pushing certain countries to the top of the list and breaking sorting completely.<p>There isn't a completely right answer, a standardised country selector might work in some (most) circumstances for most people, but what if my list needs Czechoslovakia or Zaïre? Then, a "simple" problem becomes much, much, much more complex.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/redesigning-the-country-selector/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/redesigning-the-cou...</a>
Classic simple problem that's impossible to solve.<p>The thought that web browsers support could solve this problem speaks volumes about the kind of rate people _think_ software gets updated. You could never trust input=country to be supported much less up to date thus it will always be poly filled by some library. So why the false hope?
Nice idea, but she outlined more than enough reasons not to do it. Political (Israel-Palestine, China-Taiwan, Ukraine, etc).<p>In my limited experience with automating international shipping I seem to recall UPS treats Guam, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin islands as countries (and our local CRM treated them as states).<p>There are so many controls that HTML is missing - date pickers, menus, menu flyouts etc.
Just do longitude and latitude. Show a map of the earth and let them drop a pin.<p>There is no reasonable way to get the world to agree on a single list. I doubt you could get browser developers to agree on a single list. For example Apple listing Taiwan in Safari could get Apple kicked out of mainland China. There is simply too much politics here to be tenable.
One paragraph into the article:<p>> while also marvelling at the witless mansplainers<p>Yeah, let’s make every discussion about gender, shall we?<p>How about no?
Good discussion, and it is certainly very nuanced.<p>The trouble of the developer having to create this list themselves is the reason I made <a href="http://devdata.io" rel="nofollow">http://devdata.io</a> - so you could at least have an easy starting point for all this data that is basically just copy/paste.
timezones are a similar topic in the context of managing them, except there's less politics involved. i don't see how a global solution would look like, but i'm sure china will want a different list than russia and the US will want a different list from both of them, and that's only 3 countries out of 199 or 249 or however many are there at the moment (and then the temporal aspect comes into play.)
Regarding the place of birth issue, I have never used the country I was born with when some form asked for birthplace. Always used the present state, i.e. in what country is the place I was born at.<p>Is that not common? Would you expect someone to write down GDR, USSR, or even Constantinople? Or is it again the same issue that people want to use what they like?
There is web component for that <a href="https://www.webcomponents.org/element/Protoss78/country-select" rel="nofollow">https://www.webcomponents.org/element/Protoss78/country-sele...</a>
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