On Oct 15, 2009, at 4:32 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* James Laver <j...@jameslaver.com> [2009-10-11 19:25]:
There's an appalling lack of information out there on how to
multinationally handle addresses and postcodes.
Very simple: freeform multiline text entry. Period. Anything else
is going to be broken for someone somewhere.
This would be an improvement even for typical USA addresses. For one
thing, typing your address into a single field, which you can do
entirely without thinking, is faster than a multi-field arrangement
where you have to think about whether you have to hit Tab twice after
the address to skip a second address field, whether city/state/zip is
one field or three, and in the latter case whether I can just type
two letters for my state or actually have to reach for the mouse,
click a popup menu, go back to the keyboard, and *then* type the same
two letters.
For another, you could have your address on the clipboard, in which
case entering it takes just a single keystroke.
(Then there are the forms where you have to enter your country. Some
of them are nice and put the Unites States first (proper Huffman
coding for a site that's in English) or abbreviate it as USA so
typing "US" will select it. Then there are those who do neither, so
United States gets stuck behind United Kingdom, which is itself after
United Arab Emirates, and you have to arrow your way down.)
(And then there are forms soliciting phone numbers split over three
or more fields, which when scripting is on helpfully advance to the
next field after you've filled one (exactly the way they *don't* when
scripting is off) so when you hit Tab out of habit you've now skipped
the second field. If you're going to try to be smart, at least have
the decency not to be stupid about it and *eat the subsequent Tab
event* if present.)
These days, my Web form hate has been blunted smacking up against
forms that do no client-side processing to speak of but insist that
you enable scripting so you can click their glorified submit button
-- even if you're not actually posting but just submitting search
terms. Wankers.
Josh
