Comment by rafram
You want a dropdown listing every city in the world?
You want a dropdown listing every city in the world?
Yes, that is the standard UI for this problem. You select a country, then that loads a the country's divisions ilfor another select box, and that load the cities for that division.
Another way is auto complete for the city with just country preselected.
I see that UI on some European sites. It’s basically nonfunctional for the US, at least. (Especially the latter approach with no “division” narrowing.) There are hundreds of towns with duplicate names, people might want to use region names that don’t exist politically (“Bay Area”), and people can be in incorporated towns (San Francisco) or unincorporated areas that get assigned Census Bureau names based on usage (Bay Point). There is just no way to create an autocomplete list that encompasses every valid place, and it’s a waste of time to try.
I meant a text box that users could type in, and a drop-down that returned filtered results from the input.