141–150 of 330 posts
This works really well in Ireland. Eircodes (our late adoption postal codes) resolve to individual addresses rather than areas, so Irish sites mostly do this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't remember asking for "efficiency" in typing out an address, something we teach children how to do. It doesn't seem like a societal problem worth iterating over. These tools are more than often wrong, and cause more grief for the user than any potential help it could provide. There is no developer in the world that knows this data better than the person typing it into the form.
I'd like any person or system asking for my information one field at a time to minimize my time and effort to give it to them.
> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompeten…
JRandomCustomer enters street-number, apt-number, city, state, code ... in that order.
Also, many websites seem to have a negotiation with the browser, where, given: a street address, -> they can populate the other fields.
Definitely not perfect
Le sigh. It has now a disclaimer at the top. “Hello from across the pond (or whichever body of water separates us). This is a US ZIP code website. We are aware that other countries exist.” This guy just keeps digging himself into a hole of ignorance - is he aware of Mexico? Canada?
There's a few messages it can show: 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…
Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses: there are no other countries than the US of A, and if there are, they don’t really matter. This person bought a whole domain for something that doesn’t work for 90% of the world, claiming it does, never even testing their assumption. Great job!
> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompeten…
USPS doesn't care; each ZIP code has a single preferred city name and a list of acceptable alternate city names to account for cases in which a ZIP code spans multiple cities. However, USPS's address validation will prefer to use the preferred city name for the ZIP regardless of whether the recipient actually lives within the boundaries of that city. That's because USPS has opted to organize addressing entirely aroun…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 1000 times. I’ve tried implementing what OP has mentioned, and quickly learned it isn’t possible. A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. So, to be safe, you have to enter city, state, and zip.
> A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. These are reasons you cannot deduce the Zip from the city, not the opposite. A ZIP+4 actually encodes all other information for a US address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 1000 times. I’ve tried implementing what OP has mentioned, and quickly learned it isn’t possible. A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. So, to be safe, you have to enter city, state, and zip.
> A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. These are reasons you cannot deduce the Zip from the city, not the opposite. A ZIP+4 actually encodes all other information for a US address.
Proof: a post office has its own zip code, for PO Boxes.
The +4 is the last four digits of the post office box.
If the Post Office has more than 10,000 boxes, the +4 will be duplicated.