- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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I kind of agree, but Country, really? They know most services can be used outside the US? A great way would be to choose a country (okay, if the majority of users are from the US it can be preselected), then that country’s postal code list is used to fill in the rest of the fields (and as a fallback, you can enter unlosted code and address).
I still remember some asshole American services telling me that “a postal code consists of 5 numbers” (I’m from Europe, and it’s 6 everywhere) - this is the result of going crazy on assumptions. Nice and convenient standardized systems can be built, but if you make one for an address on the planet, then start from Country and down, not from “I watched Beverly Hills 90210, this seems to work for me”it’s not 6 everywhere in Europe
Yeah, which is also the explanation why this isn’t implementented nearly as often as the author would like.
The folks implementing these address input components probably puke already from just needing different sets of input fields and formats for different countries. If they have to call different APIs with different input and output formats for every country, that increases complexity quite a bit.They talk about that in the blog
This blog assumes a lot. It’s very US centric.
I agree they probably should’ve addressed that in the main post, but at least it’s in the caveats below:
Fine, maybe country first. The purists in the comments are technically correct — postal codes aren’t globally unique. You could do country first (pre-filled via IP), then postal code, then let the magic happen. The point was never “skip the country field.” The point is: stop making me type things you already know.
This makes sense. I’m of course not against the very idea. It’s just from the main text it looks like they plan to be systematic, and then immediately jump to step 2/5/… :)
This is dumb. It’s like when they ask you for your zip code to put in some gas. I’m Canadian, I don’t have a zip code! Ours is 6 long with letters, so the whole thing breaks. (I know about the 00 trick)
Oh that zip cod
Falls apart when you accept worldwide addresses.
75001 - Am I in Texas or France?
20001 - Am I in Washington or Algeria or Spain?
10115 - Am I in New York or Germany or Dominican Republic?
I guess you could compliment that with IP geolocation and now you suddenly have an address entry form with dependencies up the wazoo and can probably push it on its own repo. Thousands of lines of code, servers processing, ice glaciers melting just so I don’t have to type in that I am from Fucking, Austria.In Europe, we use country code as prefix for postal codes.
AZ11999 is in Azerbaijan.
I’ve literally never prefixed a country code to a postal code and I’ve successfully sent over 300 letters and packages from sales on CardMarket and over 200 packages from sales on Ebay (all to EU). The country was always the last line in the address. I’ve also never done this for my own address, but I’ve seen it done yes. Particularly when an online merchant did it for me. Its a far cry from saying we do this in Europe. Its an exception rather than a rule.
This is completely broken anywhere outside the US. I’m thinking the author knows this, but if he acknowledges it, his entire point about it being easy to implement goes away. For it to work internationally, you’d have to first ask for the country, then individually point each answer to a different postal code database, down to the smallest nation, supposing that such a database is even publicly available for every nation on earth.
I tried the little tool and entered my five digit zip code. It falsely located me in the US. 😉
Jokes aside: generally the guy is not wrong. Address forms should help users by pre-filling as much information as possible.
