country selector

I've had a rant queued up on this blog but never completed about various forms of internationalisation/localisation.

One part of the rant is about web forms that ask for your country. A common way to do this is a drop down list of "every country" (deliberately in quotes). That's awful.

Its especially awful when you are from simultaneously from: Britain; United Kingdom; Great Britain; and England, all "countries" in someone's definition or another - not only do you have to scroll down to your country, you don't even know which of the four countries you are meant to scroll to until you get there and find that country missing.

I saw (on hacker news) this redesigned country selector: http://baymard.com/labs/country-selector which presents an autocompleting text box.

Type "eng" and it brings up "United Kingdom". woo!

It also converts "deut" into "Germany", but fails to convert ”日” into Japan.