On Mon, 24 Feb 2014, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
2014-02-22 3:03, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> (Note that a lot of people in the UK have no idea how to write their
> address according to current standards. For example, people often
> include the county, give the "real" town rather than the "post town",
> put things out of order, indent each line of the address, etc.)
The phenomenon is probably not limited to the UK. Few people even know
the current standards (national and international).
Well sure, but since we're writing a standard, if our assumption is that
people don't know standards, we're not going to reach a useful
conclusion.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2014, Evan Stade wrote:
Regarding UK addresses, libaddressinput[1], which is used by Google for
various products, currently accepts two levels of administrative region
for GB: city and optional county.
You need two levels, but those aren't it. :-) Counties haven't officially
been used in UK addresses since the mid 90s.
> This would be the first open-ended field name. Do we really want to
> make this open-ended? What happens if a form has n=1..3, and another
> has n=2..4? What if one has n=1, n=2, and n=4, but not n=3?
I don't know why a web author would do this
Web authors do all kinds of crazy stuff. We have to be ready for it such
that we never end up forced to introduce weird heuristics.
but n=m doesn't require n=m-1 or n=m+1 to be present. n=2..4 would just
mean the site didn't get the n=1 value.
My concern is that authors do something like this:
<input ... autocomplete="address-line-1">
<input ... autocomplete="address-level-2">
<input ... autocomplete="address-level-3">
...and then the user enters their address:
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA
...and then the user goes to another site:
<input ... autocomplete="address-line-1">
<input ... autocomplete="address-line-2">
<input ... autocomplete="address-level-1">
<input ... autocomplete="address-level-2">
<input ... autocomplete="address-level-3">
...and the browser autofills:
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
(empty)
Mountain View
Mountain View
CA
...or some such.
> How does a site know how many levels to offer?
It offers as many as it knows what to do with. It probably wouldn't know
what to do with n=5, or n=100, and it's highly unlikely a user agent
would return a value for those levels anyway, so practically speaking,
n=1 to n=3 should be sufficient for now (although n=4 seems possible in
the near future). But I don't see the purpose in setting a limit in the
spec.
This makes me extremely uncomfortable.
We're saying, "we don't know how to do this, I hope you do". Why would we
be less able to answer this than Web authors? It's not like Web authors
are experts in postal addresses.
I think we should pick the number that is actually needed, and be firm
that that is the number.
> What should a Chinese user interacting with a US company put in as
> their address, if they want something shipped to China?
They would put in the same address regardless of the nationality of the
company, assuming the company is able to properly handle their address.
Shouldn't we want everyone to be able to handle everyone's address?
Which inputs are visible to the user should depend on which country
they're entering. This means that if a user changes the country, the
inputs shuffle around and hide or show.
Are we really expecting many sites to do this? I've only seen the most
advanced sites do this.
> So they would be synonyms? Or separate fields?
They are pseudo-synonyms.
I don't know what that means.
In the US, "region" aligns with "address-level-1", and either one would
return the same value. In the UAE, where there are cities but no higher
level administrative region, "locality" aligns with "address-level-1".
In China, "address-level-1" is a province a province-level city such as
Beijing. Beijing is also "region", confusingly, and a district of the
city is a "locality".
If we're going to do this, we need to have a mapping for every locality
defined in the spec. This seems like a losing proposition.
Why not make them straight synonyms?
So generally speaking, if I ship to both China and the US, I would
create a form with "address-level-[1..4]" and if the user starts to
enter a US address, only show the first 2 levels. If the user starts to
enter a Chinese address, show more levels. If using requestAutocomplete,
all the inputs are hidden all the time anyway.
Are we going to have a list in the spec giving how many levels should be
given for each country?
Note that the "country" field is often near the end of the form. How do
you know which country the user is entering an address for when all the
user's entered is three lines of text?
(Most Web developers don't have access to a reverse geocoder that can
guess the answer from the first line.)
On Tue, 25 Feb 2014, Jürg Lehni wrote:
I think it is dangerous to make any kind of assumption about valid
postal addresses.
Here's a great list of all kinds of exceptions to rules that programmers
tend to believe to be true:
(Don't we love rules?)
http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
I didn't see any there that were contradicted by the assumptions in the
HTML spec; did you have any particular ones in mind?
