On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 19:10:15 on
Sun, 19 Jul 2009, DW downunder remarked:
I utterly hate American-designed websites which
insist on you putting a county in the address field...

The one I encountered this morning is very likely to be UK-designed
website. We have ignorant developers here too

I've never enountered a US site demanding "County". City, State (from
drop-down list) and ZIP is the usual form.

Some US sites have been internationalised, and make an attempt at
collecting addresses in other formats when you tell it what country you
are from.

I did that once - when you pick a country from a drop-down list, it
reloads the page in a version with the right address form for your country
(i think we put the country-specific form in an internal frame, and just
reloaded that, rather than the whole page). It was a bit of a demo, so we
only covered the UK, US, France and Japan. It wasn't that hard in the end,
but we spent half a day reading up on Japanese address formats and
becoming increasingly mindboggled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

The Universal Postal Union has a standard called S42 which is a gigantic
compendium of address formats for all countries, including which bits are
okay to leave out etc, and which goes into mind-numbing detail. Someone
should really sit down with it and produce some sort of open source
address format library, which web developers (or ideally, web development
framework vendors like Microsoft, Sun, the PHP Group, etc) could plug into
their sites to get properly-done internationalised address formats right
away.

tom

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