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Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

mjt.me.uk

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Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#111

Post by nodata »

ghshephard wrote: post #83
ryandrake wrote: post #68

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…

Are these seven fields all required? Because I don't have an "Address Line 2".

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#112

Post by MatthewWilkes »

userbinator wrote: post #67
hawkice wrote: post #63

A falsehood only distantly alluded to: That people have addresses at all, or can describe their residence in an unambiguous or clear way (even using GPS coordinates). I used to live in a place I couldn't even remotely give directions to. It was deep within a neighborhood of a poorer country, none of the streets had names, none of the buildings are numbered. I lived in an building where none of the apartments had numb…

even using GPS coordinates How can GPS coordinates be ambiguous? I can see different units of measure/notations being used, and the accuracy might be a problem for extremely close addresses, but wasn't it the point of GPS to provide an exact reference for any point on the planet?

In the UK, locations may be encoded as Ordinance Survey map references (I've heard of people using OS references as addresses). It is what most geo databases in the UK were keyed on, until a few years ago.

The OS uses a different datum to the GPS system, so if you convert to lat/lon you'll be out by about 150 metres (where I am, at least). You need to re-project the coordinates onto the other datum to get the real location.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#113

Post by PeterisP »

arethuza wrote: post #65
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple clerical errors rarely invalidate a contract. I'm not a lawyer though so I don't actually know. I would have done address line 1, address line 2, line3, etc. I think people got confused by your form because they are used to typing in 1234 Sample Street expecting to be asked the rest of the information further down. The other option would be on form submit to show what they have put in and say "make sure this i…

Don't know about the US, but here in the UK having an incorrect address in a contract may make it trickier to enforce a court decision against a company as certain kinds of documents used in the court process are only valid if served to the Registered Office of the company.

Why would the address on the contract matter? If the contract lists 'ABC' as their address, you still need to serve papers to their registered office which may have always been XYZ, or may have changed after the contract was signed - so in any case you have to ignore the address on the form and use the official one that you look up from the registry.

The only case where I've seen address used as a disambiguator is when treating multiple private individuals with the same name, but in that case also you want some official ID, not the address which may change frequently (and may contain a different John Smith than the one who lived there a year ago).

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#114

Post by anon4 »

> Addresses will have a street

> An address will include a state

These two are quite annoying whenever I have to write my address somewhere that presumes them. Here an address is city, city area (by name), block inside the area (by number, sometimes a letter). Blocks are numbered in the order they're built, so their numbering doesn't follow any pattern. And while there is a street passing by and it does have a name, the building itself doesn't have an address on the street.

And no, we don't have states. From the description above, you might think that the city:city area might be used like state:city, but no. City is city-sized, city area is neighbourhood-sized.

Additionally, there are addresses on streets, but those are not the same places as area-block numbers. Sites around here that need to get your address either include every possible field and ask you to only fill in the applicable ones, or give you a free-form text area after asking for which city and post code you're at.

I think amazon gets it right - country, administrative area (state in the US, something else in other countries, maybe nothing in some), city, postal code, two freeform lines.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#115

Post by jakub_g »

"Wikipedia has a photo of a parcel where a Russian/Cyrillic address was displayed on a computer with the wrong character encoding, and transcribed from that. Reportedly a russian postal worker was able to reverse the mapping and deliver the parcel."

The linked URL doesn't work anymore but thanks to Archive.org and reverse image search in Google I managed to find it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130909052627/http://en.wikiped...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ru/thumb/f/fa/Letter_t...

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#116

Post by kuschku »

wingerlang wrote: post #97
masklinn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You could manually set it via the "inspect element" I guess? If you realllly must set something.

Yup, I’ve done that far too often, I even have a bookmark to a small script that just replaces the next input box I click on with a freeform text input.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#117

Post by michaelcampbell »

cstigler wrote: post #69
userbinator wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even using GPS coordinates How can GPS coordinates be ambiguous? I can see different units of measure/notations being used, and the accuracy might be a problem for extremely close addresses, but wasn't it the point of GPS to provide an exact reference for any point on the planet?

GPS coordinates don't generally include altitude, correct? If he's in a six-floor apartment, how could GPS define which floor he's in?

Then it's not a GPS coordinate, it's a lat/long one. GPS measurements include altitude; whether or not one chooses to use it is a different matter.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#118

Post by ianhedoesit »

nodata wrote: post #111
ghshephard wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are these seven fields all required? Because I don't have an "Address Line 2".

I have never seen anywhere require "Address Line 2." It's only used as a specifier to the address when there are multiple units at the address (office buildings, apartments, and the like).

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#119

Post by zaroth »

mgkimsal wrote: post #52
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #23

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…

I got in to an argument in school with my computer programming teacher. A BASIC course, we were having to design a system to accept an address, and I was treating my ZIP code as a string. IIRC, something like 50 INPUT "Your ZIP code?", ZIP$ Everything was reviewed via handwritten code and flowchart before we were allowed to type it in in the lab, and I was told "ZIP code is a number, but you're putting it in to a str…

The worst is when you store it as a string, having learned from others' mistakes, but then upon exporting to CSV... Excel kindly strips the leading 0 and you get a bug report that your software is screwing up the ZIP codes!

Took a bit of searching before finding this: https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/handling-leading-zero-in...

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

#120

Post by Symbiote »

hayksaakian wrote: post #106
tombrossman wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picking an arbitrary starting point like 'country' still has problems. I'm in Jersey Channel Islands, which isn't a country at all (much like Vatican City & other territories). We are British but not part of the UK nor members of the EU. We're served by the British Royal Mail system and use UK-style postcodes, but sometimes when I input my address I must chose a country, so pick UK, which triggers UK VAT on my order.…

Sorry I'd this comes off as tangential: What kind of internet service do you have where you live (speed wise) ? I've always considered island life, but poor internet service has put me off.

Jersey is a tax haven (40% of the economy is evading tax), lying 20km from France and 160km from Britain, so there's no reason the internet access has to be bad.

http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/Broadband/Products/H... — it's a bit expensive, and has a usage cap, but that seems more to do with the lack of competition than it being an island.

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