In what way are "American Website Owners" responsible for this problem? I've seen it plenty of times going in the other direction. Such a typical European way of thinking...
Dear American Website Owner
121–130 of 149 posts
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely — which is I would recommend providing multi-line edit boxes for addresses. That way you can enter your address any way you see fit. You really know best how to address mail so that it gets to you, why would I want to pretend I know better?
Yeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.
It works very well for me. Provided the goal of the address field is to copy/paste it verbatim to an envelope - if you want to actually understand the different parts of the address this might be counterproductive.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#123It 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…
I just wanted to point out (with humor!) that you are grumpy about English folk not understanding the rest of the UK, and yet you yourself (as a Scot) have no idea how Wales and N.I are organised!
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#124What'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.
I only proposed getting rid of the state field, not the city. I have no idea whether cities share zip codes, but that seems a lot more probable than states sharing zip codes. And even if they did, unless that zip code also had two cities named the same, it would still be uniquely identify an address.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#125Oh, it gets worse fast.
I hate street address validators that insist you live in a house or apartment with a number on a given street.
Because?
I live in flat m at street number n on Foo Street.
Here in Scotland -- where I live -- there are three ways to put this on an envelope, all recognized by the post office:
Flat m, n Foo Street
m/n Foo Street (this is the one in the Post Office postcode lookup database)
Flat xFy n Foo Street (where y is floor number and x is apartment number on that floor, e.g. 3F2, 12 High Street)
... So why do so many Javascript address validators throw out m/n or xFy format addresses for having an illegal character in the middle? Including British ones, that back onto the official Post Office lookup database?
Address formats aren't standardized internationally. They aren't even standardized within countries with a unified postal service.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#126Not sure how many people have tried to actually make international address forms, but it's really difficult. Despite a lot of searching, I have yet to find any web site or book or library that can handle all international addresses properly while still letting you validate that the data is reasonable (city/state/postal code) etc.
It's not that American-run web sites don't want to support international formats, but when 95% of your business is from America, it just doesn't make business sense to deal with the complexity of international addresses for 5% of your revenues.
I'd love it if someone can point me to a library/book/tutorial of the appropriate way to handle this situation. NOTE: I haven't looked that recently, but did about a year ago.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
E.164 format. Every valid number in the world can be represented. The downside is that most people don't even know that this exists, so when doing an international based system, you have a filter based on the country they user is based in and automatically apply any codes needed. Just strip everything out of the field that isn't a number and prepend the country code if the region doesn't normally include it. That mea…
The transform isn't that simple. For example, UK numbers start with a 0 to indicate STD (long distance) - but that 0 must be stripped for calls from another country. Ie, 01234 567890 is dialed from abroad as +44 1234 567890.
This gets into dial semantics vs. number format, which then becomes an element of user behavior. I don't know how user behavior is in a large number of other countries, but the U.S. I know typical reaction to "enter your full phone number" is area code + number, not 1 + area code + number.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#128Dear German Website Owner (yeah, this works both ways) I do have a state in my postal address, and if I have to enter my address as 47374 Richmond instead of Richmond IN 47374, it will probably go to Virginia first, and maybe they'll get it to me eventually. Just saying. Internationalism is hard. If you want to go for the global market, it would behoove you to try to do it right.
Absolutely — which is I would recommend providing multi-line edit boxes for addresses. That way you can enter your address any way you see fit. You really know best how to address mail so that it gets to you, why would I want to pretend I know better?
A lot of people use fields such as state and zip code for demographic data collection. A free form textbox makes that more difficult.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you respond to other general advice to Website operators in the same way, or just to foreigners telling Americans what to do?
An interesting point about tone. If this had been pitched as "sites do international addresses wrong" as opposed to "Americans do it wrong!", there'd probably be less defensiveness, less snideness, less "typical American can't read", etc.
Look, I'm an American, and having lived elsewhere, I've been bitten many a time by this kind of thoughtless antipattern. And when I am, I don't think, "Oh my, this Web designer of uncertain origin didn't study his field," I curse, moan, and wail, "Stupid bleeping Americans have failed again to understand the complexity of their world!"
I don't know where you're from, obviously, but having grown up in Indiana, I'm all too aware of the oblivious American nature, and I find the original post entirely justified in its tone. As far as I'm concerned, the defensiveness here is good ol' American exceptionalism at work, and anybody who wants to have global business had better get over that.
I second or third the notion that a nice library would be a Good Thing.
Re: Dear American Website Owner
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I should be more specific. This is an actual problem I've had on actual German sites.
What exactly were you buying from Germany that you couldn't find in the USA? Oh... I see...
Books in German. Also contact information as a freelancer for translation agencies, who really should know better (but their Web designers often don't). But your joke was very funny.