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Similar lists: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... Falsehoods programmers believe about time: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...
Fell free to send pull requests! :)
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1. There is no order, just use whatever the user entered. In general don't get smart with this data just treat it as a single blob of text. 2. Sort by the whole thing 3. No you can't guarantee identifying family members any more than with a first name last name system. If you need that it should be an additional part of the system. Presumably for the 90% of people who does have a typical first name, last name combo y…
I realized that I am in agreement on point number 1 - don't get smart with this data, in which case the other points are not very relevant. But suppose you are working at a place where people are keen on getting 'smart with the data', your replies do increase the entropy if only to the extent that 'we have this idiot programmer who thinks he is too smart to use first and last names as we have always done and is break…
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Your address entry needs to be flexible enough to accommodate pretty much arbitrary text. There are no universally required fields for addresses. Zip/postal codes are almost universal, but not entirely. E.g. "name; town; country" is sufficient some places; "name; postcode + town; country" is very common, but it can also go to the opposite extreme of a ridiculous number of separate items, so it's best to just give a n…
I agree with everything you are saying, but you ended your comment with "what should we call you in context X?". "What should we call you in context X" is, at least in the context of the current discussion, the same as a non-nullable string for the name field. Or am I misunderstanding your comment? To add to my previous comment, what if two or more people from the same address are signed up for your service? How woul…
> To add to my previous comment, what if two or more people from the same address are signed up for your service? How would you help them distinguish between the correspondence each one gets from your company?
By asking "what should we call you when mailing you?" (if you insist on a name field) or "which address (including name) should we use when mailing you?" You could then if you wish pre-populate any variation of name you might have on file for them in those fields; the point is that the more you focus on gathering the specific information you need for that specific context, the fewer wrong assumptions you will be making about what the user would actually prefer.
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In the world the number of people whose names do not consist of ASCII characters only wastly outnumber those whose do.
Interesting that you chose to respond only to the part of the commenters' statement where you had a reasoned response and ignored the second part of their statement altogether.