Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I have my doubts as to whether a generic solution solves this.

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".

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?

Tldr: The list depends on context. I'm skeptical that a centralized list could deal with commonly used contexts.

View on HN

For shipping too, not just that every shipper ships to every country, but that shippers ship to different countries unequally: costs associated change or they only ship below certain weights or they require three dozen more customs forms to be signed (each in triplicate). Many of the shippers have rather complex APIs for that (give me the country list and shipping cost for this assumed package weight range), how would you try to replicate that in the browser?

Someone on twitter suggested using the OS' own list of countries, working around the problem of the standard having to define what is/isn't a country. I think that's a reasonable solution.

Windows dropped having a list of countries in the 9x era because there were too many international issues and disputes. It's also why they dropped even trying to draw the shapes of time zones because that too was causing international border complaints.

An input list of all current passport issuing countries would be useful. The Scotland problem doesn't arise as they don't issue passports (the UK does).

what about taiwan? what about taiwan if you're in china...?

My thoughts exactly.

This means Google would be determining whether Taiwan is an independent country or not, making either China, or more probably Taiwan unhappy. Something besides the browser would need to determine what your list of countries is, like the site itself... but a solution like that is much less elegant. Chrome having regional behavior also just sounds like more mess for devs. Some sites will deliberately want to pick sides, and should be able to.

Geographic data will have to come from somewhere, to add countries to this list that "don't exist" in whatever the built-in list of country options is.

I believe Palestine has a similar issue. They have passports, but few countries recognize them.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_passport , the issuing country code is:

TWN, the ISO country code for Republic of China, listed as "Taiwan, Province of China" in ISO 3166-1

And then someone tries to use it for an app where you have to select which national football you play for.

Or anything involving legal system/jurisdiction or company registration (both of which are differ between countries within the UK).

The UK and the Netherlands are both (according to ISO 3166-2 [0]) countries which contain other countries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2

In the case of The Netherlands, this is plain wrong.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands contains four countries, being The Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. According to ISO 3166-2, there exists a country "The Netherlands" which contains the other three. Close, but not correct.

Sealand issues passports, but they are not recognized by any other country.

Israel issues passports, but people holding an Israeli passport also hold some other country's passport if they want to travel to any other country in the MENA region. Also, recognizing Israel as a country will lead to the most interesting discussions in your software's support fora.

Behind every standards dispute is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com