Kudos on the nice UX for dropdown with countries. I wish more websites do it. Usually, it's "United States" at the very top, and 194 other countries in a loooooong list.
Even better are the ones where you pick your country and the 'state' dropdown is still US states and 'Other', and you're prompted for a 'zip code'. What does American mail have to do with a zip anyway?
Not sure if your question is flippant/rhetorical, but in case you're genuinely curious: ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan, the initiative that set up the "postal codes" that we call ZIP codes.
I don't quite recall, but I think ZIP may actually be a backronym; in US English, "zip" is a word that also means "to move quickly", and they wanted to evoke a feeling that postal mail gets delivered faster when you include the ZIP code, which makes sorting mail more efficient.
Ooo yes there's nothing I hate more than an address form for a business that clearly works internationally being only really compatible with US addresses. My "state"? At least Germany or something has states the UK does not. My "city"? In the UK cities and towns are distinct and I am from a town. I have very occasionally actually then not been able to proceed because someone has not actually configured the "zip code" field to accept postal codes that include letters.
I use navigator.languages to guess the user's possible countries. It's not perfect, but the cost of guessing wrong is low. I've used the same technique to show currency conversion tooltips in the content.
> I use navigator.languages to get a list of supported languages. For example, en-CA, fr-CA, de-DE. This gives me a list of countries the user might have lived in. I suggest those countries at the top of the country list.
The OP wrote this is based on "navigator.languages" feature in the visitor's browser. So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown.
> So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown.
If it’s French from France, yes. This is the second part of the language code: fr_FR is French from France, fr_BE from Belgium, fr_BF from Burkina Faso and so on.
Good point! But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-)
> But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-)
This is accessory; the goal is to suggest relevant options for someone based on the language they configured their browser with.
> Also, you missed other language codes for French: […]
These are combinations of a language code (fr) and a region code; the list is not standardized and could theorically be extended to all the regions with an ISO code. What’s interesting here is the region code, not the language.
It still shows the "194 other countries" in a long list, which is what the person complained about. (I don't mind that btw, but the logic of the person who said that this UX is different escapes me)