41–50 of 152 posts
The rigidity of street addresses is relatively new (within living memory)and was designed to accommodate a technological gap (paper maps, basically, and emergency services).
It’s more humane to let people specify things like addresses the way they want (my grandmother refused to kowtow to the imposition of numerical street addresses and continued to use her house name until the day she died).
This is like the Spanish Academy changing the alphabetic sorting rules in the 1990s because crufty PCs had trouble with ch and ll — and then shortly thereafter they became fast enough!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your feedback but even beyond that the "Enter city or plus code" form seems broken. I went to a random place in mongolia, I got a plus code of "5PJF+FJQ" and when I enter it in the form it doesn't work: https://plus.codes/5PJF+FJQ I think it's a nice concept though, I could see myself using something like that if it became more mainstream, it's a little more convenient than GPS coordinates if you want to…
It works if you append the plus code with a comma followed by the country name.
Lack of adoption effectively functions as vendor lock-in :(
Instead it's because:
a) enough online shops assume you have one b) advertising mail providers needed it
Frankly if physical spammers need it, then that's an argument against having it to me, and it's sad that online shops forced this by just assuming we had them :(
It's funny, even in the Netherlands we feel a (tiny, tiny) bit of this: all foreign websites have address entry systems that always ask for a state/province (and even faithfully produce a list of all our provinces). We indeed have them but locals ignore them entirely, city, street, number and postal code are all we, and domestic companies, use.
Same for Denmark, technically we do have regions but they're not even worth writing on any address. Same goes for Portugal, where I've lived: no state/province/region exists; on forms stupid enough to require that you just end up putting the city name again. Same goes for requiring city and postcode.
This triggers a more general hot button for me. Computers should be there to help,people, not the other way around. The rigidity of street addresses is relatively new (within living memory)and was designed to accommodate a technological gap (paper maps, basically, and emergency services). It’s more humane to let people specify things like addresses the way they want (my grandmother refused to kowtow to the imposition…
I have also encountered web forms which must validate my address. Turns out, the backing database did not contain my address. I could not order at the store. After contacting the store, they told me that their data was always accurate and therefore I must be a fraud.
Finally, I got it to work by typing "Campus of Place, Faculty of Building". It wouldn't work without the words "Place" and "Building", which we don't ever use (we typically just write "Faculty of , Campus of "). And the form didn't provide any clue about that being the problem.
The address on a letter has always been a free text input field, it still is when one writes private letters, and everything works fine. Why they have to complicate so much something that just works is beyond me.
Ironic that this article comes out at the same time so many people on the internet are getting angry about "shithole" remark.