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Dear American Website Owner

jan.rychter.com

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Re: Dear American Website Owner

#131

Post by Vivtek »

kpanghmc wrote: post #116
WingForward wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is parsing the addresses on the back end harder than providing the same number of support formats on the front end?

Parsing on the backend, even when only considering United States addresses is incredibly difficult and error prone. There are apartment numbers, rural routes, PO boxes, circles, streets named after compass directions (i.e. North, South, East, West), streets whose direction names appear before or after the street itself (e.g. N. Main St. vs Main St. N.), military addresses, and the list goes on and on. It's a terrible…

For the US, the USPS can help you with some of that.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#132

Post by zach »

Vivtek wrote: post #131
kpanghmc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parsing on the backend, even when only considering United States addresses is incredibly difficult and error prone. There are apartment numbers, rural routes, PO boxes, circles, streets named after compass directions (i.e. North, South, East, West), streets whose direction names appear before or after the street itself (e.g. N. Main St. vs Main St. N.), military addresses, and the list goes on and on. It's a terrible…

For the US, the USPS can help you with some of that.

Yes, but they make good money licensing those databases for managed use to nice companies like:

http://www.semaphorecorp.com/

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#133

Post by petercooper »

Vivtek wrote: post #92
petercooper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? "State" is really just equivalent to "second-level subdivision" (a bit like how "ZIP code" can mean "postal code" in general, as long as the box allows freeform input). Most c…

They do if you want to receive mail. Puerto Rican municipalities have nothing whatsoever to do with mailing addresses (and in fact the situation is worse, since many PR addresses include an "urbanization"). Moreover, Indiana has counties that correspond to Puerto Rican municipalities. Drawing this sort of specious parallel is entertaining, to be sure, but doesn't help people place orders.

Drawing this sort of specious parallel is entertaining, to be sure, but doesn't help people place orders.

It does if the order form requires this information. A little extraneous information on the postage label isn't going to cause significant delays for your mail as long as the underlying details are right (street address and ZIP code for most of the US - everything else is filler). Mail delivery systems are designed to deal with this (hence the introduction of the ZIP code in the first place) because people don't always address their mail to technical specifications.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#134

Post by Timmy_C »

mooism2 wrote: post #54
Timmy_C wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's an HTML element then you can click it to give it focus then start typing the name of option you wish to select.

But it would be easier for the customer if the website guessed from the customer's IP address which country they were in, and put it at the top of the list (as well as in its normal position).

That sounds like a good little usability trick. I might do that next time I have a countries dropdown in a form.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#135

Post by Timmy_C »

tghw wrote: post #87
jwr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to write a blog post which elaborated on all possible internationalization issues, it would become a PhD dissertation and take a year to write. And then it wouldn't even touch on all the issues. You have to start somewhere — and let's face it, dealing with the two silly problems I mentioned would get us 80% of the way there.

I gave it a shot of my own. I didn't do all the permutations, and surely left out big swaths that I've never even thought of, but it's a start... http://hicks-wright.net/blog/stupid-american-website-owners/

This post made me laugh. And I think it is exactly at what I trying to get at when I said that internationalization isn't easy. Nice!

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#136

Post by chronomex »

jasonlotito wrote: post #86
jwr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to write a blog post which elaborated on all possible internationalization issues, it would become a PhD dissertation and take a year to write. And then it wouldn't even touch on all the issues. You have to start somewhere — and let's face it, dealing with the two silly problems I mentioned would get us 80% of the way there.

I had to deal with International phone numbers before. Obviously, I had to deal with other issues, too, but the phone number was the important piece. Early on, before PayPal or other services caught on, we created a system to verify credit card users with their telephone. They would enter their telephone number and we'd call them. It was simple. The problem was with international users. The system was simple: it woul…

That sounds like a really awesome bit of code to look at. Can you share it?

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#137

Post by chronomex »

awolf wrote: post #3

I wish author was a little more constructive here. What phone number pattern would he recommend we use?

http://wtng.info/ would be a good place to start. It's a lot of work to do right. You have to support full international numbers as short as 7 digits (Tokelau has +690 XXXX) and as long as 15 digits (in Germany the telco basically gives subscribers a subnet-like functionality, as extra dialled digits are passed along during call origination).

Ideally you'd be able to parse it into a punctuation format based on local practice, but just about everyone punts on that.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#138

Post by ubernostrum »

jwr wrote: post #57
Vivtek wrote: post #26

Dear 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?

So you have a strong AI doing natural-language parsing to figure out from that freeform address whether you need to charge sales tax/VAT?

If you're doing business across state/province or national borders, getting that structured address data (and getting it right) can be awfully important.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#139

Post by ubernostrum »

njharman wrote: post #45

I've argued many times for making address one big text field. Let people who live in the country, who own the address, format it how they know it should be formatted.

Freeform address boxes can make some things more difficult:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1234105

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#140

Post by timthorn »

ismarc wrote: post #127
timthorn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. In the UK, the zero is always regarded as part of the area code.
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