[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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