Put the zip code first

      const msgs = [
        `Yes, we know ${country} exists. We're very proud of you.

This site is about US address forms — the ones that make Americans scroll past Turkmenistan 200 times a year. You have your own postal code problems. We believe in you.`,
        `We see you're visiting from ${country}. Welcome. We regret to inform you that this rant is specifically about American address forms, which are — and we cannot stress this enough — unbelievably bad.

Your country probably has its own postal code horrors. We'd love to hear about them: shame@zipcodefirst.com`,
        `Hello from across the pond (or whichever body of water separates us from ${country}). This is a US ZIP code website. We are aware that other countries exist. We just have 160 million addresses and a 50-state dropdown to be mad about first.

Your frustrations are valid. Your postal codes are also useful. Put them first too.`
      ];

08036 Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

08036 Hainesport, New Jersey, USA

It does make some sense to go from most general (country) to more specific (address) instead of the opposite, so the form can implement better auto completions.

However in practice postal addresses are not that clean so simple dumb forms are usually better, because it's easy for exceptions to be missed by auto completion algorithms. I would be very pissed if I had to type the zip code above and then correct the wrong guess on every website.

Either you are helpful and guess correctly or you don't guess at all.

Do zipcodes change for example? Can your drop-down quickly go out-of-date? You'd need a way to manually enter a city so people are able to tell the system an address. Do you want to bother making an auto-updating zipcode feature just for a form?

Is it going to confuse people because nobody else has bothered to make this superfancy selection feature thing?

Is this USA only? There are postal codes/zipcode-equivalents in other countries.

It starts to feel it's likely not worth the time and effort to try to be smart about this particular feature. At least not if I'm imagining this us some generic, universal address web form that is supposed to be usable for USA-sized areas.

To me it feels similar to that famous article about what you can and cannot assume about people's names; turns out they can be way more complicated and weird than one might assume.

Although maybe zipcodes don't really go that deep in complexity. But on the spot I would not dare to assume they are.