91–100 of 150 posts
Without a current streetmap of the entire world, how would you really know it's a bogus address?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Punt and let customer support handle it" is a pretty lazy solution, in my view. Additionally, what a developer might think of as a "99.9%" solution is more often than not a 99% solution, or a 90% solution. With enough customers, dealing with everyone who can't use your slapped-together form will be more expensive than doing it right. Software doesn't become great by assuming someone else will handle the edge cases a…
Except, in this scenario, it's relatively easy to come up with a good 99.9% solution: Seven text fields will cover greater than 99.9% of users: Name Address Line 1 Address Line 2 City State Country Postal Code So much of that article discussed stuff that was irrelevant - Live in Singapore? Great, just fill in Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. I've done that on many, many sites and it's always worked fine. Don't have a…
PO Box XXXX
Dubai
UAE
Flat XXXX
Building Name next to / opposite / near Landmark
Area Name
Name Surname
Tel: 05XXXXXXXX
Flat XXXX, Building Name
Next To Landmark
Area Name
PO Box XXXX
Dubai
UAE
Edit: Area names have their own fun: There is a road going from one end of the country to the other which in Dubai is called Sheikh Zayed Road (it has a number and different names in other emirates :D), but that is also the name of an area along part of the road.
That article can also be read as a list of things that need to be fixed by the various postal systems. We can issue addresses to computers, many of which cannot be considered to be in a fixed place, yet somehow we can't issue a permanent, unique address to something that's not likely to move around much.
Trying to get everyone on the planet to massively change how they view the world is not easy.
"A road will only have one name" This one's particularly common in Edinburgh. In fact in the example they use - "Regent Road" connects to Princes Street, which becomes Shandwick Place, then Atholl Place. At this point the main fork becomes Dalry Road which then becomes Gorgie Road which becomes Stenhouse Road and then Calder Road - all of which are roughly a straight line: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Calder+Road,…
Local council clearly made an error when putting the two named street signs on each side of the corner, nobody has ever known which one it was supposed to be in the first place, and so... this.
[unit-number, ]building-number street-name
city/town, province/territory, country
postal-code
Later, I had the opportunity to work in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, which violated most of my assumptions, both explicit and implicit. First, the territory (not province) of Nunavut is a relatively recent creation, having been created by splitting off a part of the Northwest Territories on April 1st, 1999. Before that, the addresses were all in a different territory.
Second, Iqaluit uses a system where every building in the city has a unique number. Currently (2015) the highest number is rapidly approaching 7000, but at the time it was in the 5000s. In addition to their unique number, some buildings also have a name, which is sometimes written only in the Latin alphabet, sometimes written only in the Inuktitut syllabary, sometimes either, and in at least one case both. When a building has both a name and a number, people may use just one or the other. (I haven't found a building without a number yet, but I'm no longer going to assume there aren't any.)
Street names were not introduced until 2003, and when they were, all street signs were labeled in both the Latin alphabet and the Inuktitut syllabary. Since the system of uniquely numbering every building is continuing, most people ignore the street names unless they're actually talking about streets, not buildings. Nonetheless, some attempts have been made to get everyone to change their mailing addresses to include the street. In every case, everyone has agreed that use of the Inuktitut syllabary should be encouraged.
All these peculiarities are in the territorial capital, where almost all the territorial government and law-enforcement addresses are, so anyone dealing with addresses for the Canadian government should be aware of this (but probably isn't).
On a related topic, the US has long had a system of two-letter abbreviations for its states, commonly used in its addresses. Canada eventually introduced a standard set of two-letter abbreviations for all its provinces and territories, being careful not to duplicate any of the US state abbreviations. However, many people still use the traditional abbreviations, which are of variable length, sometimes have completely different French and English versions, and sometimes include hyphens to prevent confusion with US state abbreviations. (So 'T-N' might appear, meaning 'Terre-Neuve', the French name for Newfoundland, with the hyphen mandatory to prevent it from being mistaken for the US abbreviation for Tennessee. Periods and capital letters with accents also appear, e.g. 'Î.P.É.')
Since its introduction, the "standard" two-letter system has seen at least three name changes. Quebec was PQ before 1991 and is now QC, although sometimes QU or QB show up, Nunavut was added in 1999 (previously part of NT, now NU), and Newfoundland changed its name to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001, and its abbreviation from NF to NL in 2002. Also, the territory formerly known as "Yukon Territory" officially changed its name to just "Yukon" on April 1st, 2003. (What is it with the Canadian territories and changing important stuff on April 1st?) Their postal abbreviation did not change however. It's still YT, not YK, despite the latter being used fairly often and making more sense now.
This matters because not all two-letter abbreviations appearing in the database (this includes your database) are on the standard list, either because they were entered incorrectly, or because they were correct when they were entered, but have since changed, and the database wasn't updated for fear of breaking working code. As a result, a naive lookup-table to get the full province name from the two-letter abbreviation will fail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least it helps if you don't block on empty fields then - I keep getting annoyed when sites demand I enter "state/province" for international shipping when my country doesn't have that concept. Or demand that I enter 6-digit postal code when we only use 4. Or not being able to handle non-ASCII chars. And things like that - helping people is fine and useful, but blocking a user because you set up assumptions valid o…
> I keep getting annoyed when sites demand I enter "state/province" for international shipping when my country doesn't have that concept. And uses a select box of US states, so even if your country did have such a concept (and used it for mail, which may not be the case) you couldn't give it.
Is it common to believe that post codes don't start with zero? All of New England (ME, MA, NH, CT, RI, VT) have zero starting post codes. Plus apparently a part of New Jersey. Map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code Also, since it brought up naval vessels, here's the addresses of all US Navy ships: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/lists/ship-fpo.asp Anyways, the post office does a wonderful job delivering m…
> Is it common to believe that post codes don't start with zero? It may be less of an explicit belief and more of a case of "This looks like a number! Let's store it as a number!" which wipes out leading zeros.
I read this article a long time ago and I took it seriously. So instead of asking for address, postal/zip code, city, state/province, I just put up a big text area labeled "Full address" so that people have complete freedom about what to fill in. 80% of the users ended up only filling in their street address, not their postal/zip code, city and state/province, even though they're from countries where (most?) addresse…
First thing we discovered: We might have been happy with one big box, but none of the payment services we use worked the same way. This more than cancelled out any usability benefit, because we could no longer reliably pre-fill the address fields on any form for card or bank details. Our customers would still wind up entering the specific parts of their address anyway, but now they effectively had to type the same address twice during the sign-up process as well! (Edit: There’s also a related issue that some browsers will remember and pre-fill fields that look like common address parts automatically, which to my knowledge no browser does for an open-ended address.)
Second thing we discovered: Same as 'FooBarWidget, given a freeform text field, some customers will give you beautifully formatted multi-line addresses, some will stick everything on one line, some will stick just the first line on that one line, some will assume you meant e-mail address(!) and so on.
More recently, we also discovered a third issue because we’re in the EU: I can see no reasonable way to automatically parse any common address format that is sufficient to comply fully with the new VAT place-of-supply rules, but to have a chance of even getting close in the 99% case you at least need to have a separate country indicator.
I do sympathise with the frustration of having to break down addresses into different fields. If the big bureaucracies like payment schemes and governments had more practical rules for working with customers in different locations, one big box really is all we should need, though getting customers to enter something valid in it is still a tricky issue. But since those more practical rules seem unlikely to happen any time soon, there is little either we or our immediate service providers can do but follow the dubious but widely accepted conventions anyway.
An observation: My street address is XXXX Martin Luther King Jr Way, Apt XXX The number of organizations that accept the address, but chop off the apartment number when they send mail because it is too long is ridiculous. Even better, it tends to be government departments. For example, the IRS does this. Martin Luther King Jr Way has to be one of the most common street names in the US. Many orgs can't even get the si…