I just wanted to thank everyone for their comments. I think I'll go with option 2 (follow the US model but with more generic terminology), and trust in your anecdotal evidence that orders will arrive in a timely manner.
Richard On Wednesday 23 March 2005 22:31, Richard Esplin wrote: > The past couple of months many of my clients have wanted help making their > web forms friendly for their international customers. Unfortunately, there > doesn't seem to be any international standard for accepting and displaying > mailing addresses. As far as I can tell, there are only three real options: > > 1) Accept the address as a blob of text formatted however the user chooses. > Though this is very flexible, it prevents any sort of validation or > reporting. > > 2) Accept the address in a manner similar to a US address, but with more > generic names: Street Address, Locality, Region, Postal Code, Country. This > is how KDE applications approach the problem. The down side is that not > every area of the world has an address that fits this schema. > > 3) Ask the user to enter a country, and then display input boxes based on > that specific country. This is perhaps the most correct solution, but very > complex to manage. > > Which of these methods have you used with your clients? What causes you to > prefer one method over another? Is there a better way that I have not > thought of? > > Is there a tool which can do the work for me? I have searched both PEAR and > CPAN looking for a module which might help me do this, but nothing seems to > fit. There are lots of proprietary modules I could purchase, but none seems > to be worth the money. Is there a tool that you would recommend? > > Thanks in advance for any input, > > Richard Esplin <snip> .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
