[thelist] Re: international friendly form
Brian Forte
bforte at adelaide.on.net
Wed Feb 7 01:49:31 CST 2001
Michael,
You wrote:
>I have a form for User's contact information that must accomodate
>many countries and be context sensitive, i.e. State for US, Province
>for Canada. Has anyone done it well or seen it done well?
I don't remember ever seeing it done well, and I'm no judge as to
whether the following is an example of it being done well but I offer
it FWIW. A quick English-language centric address form that has no
ties to a particular back-end process and relies only on HTML 3.2:
<http://www.betweenborders.com/form/>.
I threw it together after being brassed off one too many times by an
on-line form I couldn't fill in because the designer made too many
assumptions about address formats.
And Mike Hardaker wrote:
>As a non-septic (from the Cockney rhyming-slang "Septic Tank =
>Yank") I can get very steamed up about this stuff, so I'm sorry if
>I've over-written. However, US coders should remember that, while
>they are part of the world's biggest market, that market is still a
>minority. And If you can't be bothered to code for the rest of us,
>well, we might choose to deal with the people who can.
I can get pretty steamed up about this as well. (I was pissed off
enough yesterday to spend an hour producing the above page rather
than doing paid work.)
Nonetheless, I'm willing to cut designers at least some slack.
Capturing contact information from all over the world isn't easy to
start with. Storing it so as to be confident postal items sent to
said contacts will arrive safely adds another layer of difficulty,
since virtually every country has different standards for addressing
letters and packages.
My own quick effort above doesn't make life any easier for people
outside the English-speaking world but, to quote myself "the goal is
to make things as easy as possible for the majority of those filling
out the form without unnecessarily inconveniencing visitors or
customers coming from unexpected quarters."
Regards,
Brian Forte.
--
Brian Forte, <mailto:bforte at betweenborders.com>
Writer, editor, scripter, dangerous mind.
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