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Dear American Website Owner

jan.rychter.com

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Re: Dear American Website Owner

#31

Post by tosiabunio »

cwbrandsma wrote: post #28

Actually, as a web site owner, for a number of my sites, they are INTENTIONALLY USA only. Sorry that you happened to stumble across them, but I either do not care about your business, don't want to deal with the hassle (international shipped, phone, regulations, etc), or legally cannot serve your area.

Acually, as typical American, you are unable to read and understand such short text. It is directed to those website owners who do want to deal with the hassle you don't care about.

"The moment you put a "country" field in your form, two things should happen:" - that sentence should give you a clue.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#32

Post by lutorm »

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state?

About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on numbers.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#33

Post by Semiapies »

whyenot wrote: post #29
sigzero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm...no. Do you not see the problem with that reasoning?

I'm not snitko, but I don't see the problem. Could you please explain your reasoning?

To be blunt, inputs you don't validate are inputs that will be entered wrong a significant portion of the time. Other concerns may override this for many fields, but unusable phone numbers are generally considered a problem.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#34

Post by dionidium »

lutorm wrote: post #32

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on number…

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state?

No. Zip codes may cross state lines.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#35

Post by lincolnq »

lutorm wrote: post #32

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on number…

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state?

Redundancy. The postal service can usually deliver if you screw up one of city, state, and zip code. If you got rid of city/state then any error in zip code would result in failure to deliver.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#36

Post by vital101 »

lutorm wrote: post #32

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on number…

You could probably do without city as well if using zip codes. Obviously this doesn't hold water for international setups, but it could be nice for the US.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#37

Post by petercooper »

spatulon wrote: post #21
Major_Grooves wrote: post #13

It can happen within countries too. Most UK websites will require you to enter a "county". That's fine in England, because England is divided in to lots of counties (e.g. Essex, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire etc.). However, Scotland does not have counties any more. They were abolished before I was even born and replaced with regions. It might sound nit-picking, but it's one of these things that adds to the chip on our s…

FWIW, not all parts of England are in counties either, so don't feel like you're being singled out. York isn't in Yorkshire, for example. It is its own unitary authority. Even Amazon demands a county, so I put North Yorkshire. Close enough. The Royal Mail are happy for old curmudgeons and the like to use traditional counties in addresses, if they wish: http://www.abcounties.co.uk/bpa/bpacontents.htm All that Royal Ma…

York isn't in Yorkshire, for example. It is its own unitary authority. Even Amazon demands a county, so I put North Yorkshire. Close enough.

It's not just "close enough" - it's entirely correct. York is in the "ceremonial" or "geographical" county of North Yorkshire. And addresses are geographical references, after all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England (though, technically, you should probably just go with whatever the Royal Mail determines is valid)

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#38

Post by gn »

Timmy_C wrote: post #27

I think this blog post REALLY overlooks the fact that interface localization isn't easy; even with a simple web forms. The interface for a search engine is a single input field with dynamic suggestions and people were in an uproar when Bing didn't give suggestions that were localized to the user's country or language. That's to say, if one of the biggest software companies in the world can't get it right, then what h…

Not every aspect of this is easy, true, but that's no reason not to tackle the ones that are. It's trivial to simply not require a state or a postcode or try to verify a phone no if the user selects a country other than the US.

There should be a library for this. We have libraries that can handle the insanely capricious details of DST for all countries and subnational entities on the planet; we should have no problem providing one list of states and two regular expressions per nation.

(I know it's more or less impossible to reliably catch (e.g.) invalid UK postcodes, but we wouldn't have to. We'd mainly want to catch obvious typos without making things needlessly hard for customers overseas.)

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