Proposal to replace documented syntax for telephone extensions

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@Minh_Nguyen

Ideally, we would standardize on tel: URIs for all phone numbers and rely on editors and data consumers to pretty-print the URIs using off-the-shelf libraries. There are off-the-shelf libraries for detecting and parsing phone numbers, too, but they reject this exotic \;ext=* syntax.

Here are some examples of popular software libraries for detecting, parsing, and formatting phone numbers:

• libphonenumber for a variety of languages
• libphonenumber-js for JavaScript (live demo)
• react-phone-number-input for React (live demo)
• PhoneNumberKit for Swift

These libraries are used very widely across the software landscape and would be very unlikely to add any special affordances for an OSM-specific format. Some of them have live demos that you can use to prototype potential syntaxes.