[thelist] fun with form entries

Courtenay court3nay at gmail.com
Tue Mar 1 15:38:16 CST 2005


On a more positive note, in the UK (from memory) you can get any
address from just a street number and postcode.. so a full-text
address can really just be a "parity check".

Most countries have formatting standards for addressing envelopes, and
here in Australia the post office will actually reject your packages
(corporate customers) if the labelling isn't up to scratch; so if you
want to remove that extra step of human-server-side-validation of 
address data, some really snazzy javascript validation is in order, or
for the lazy coder, a bunch of required fields.

i guess it comes down to having enough specific rules for discrete countries..

> textarea..?!
> 
> Have you ever seen the sorts of data people will enter if you just let
> them free-form?
> 
> 
<snip>
> > I'm just ranting, but really the more you try to apply strict rules to this
> > sort of data entry the more likely you are to bollocks it up for somebody.
> >
> > Not everywhere has States. Or Provinces, Regions, Territories, etc. Many,
> > MANY places do not have postal codes. Lots of places with postal codes
> > don't use only numeric characters in their postal code.
> >
> > This also applies to phone numbers.
> >
> > Fancy tricks have their place. The order form of a website is not one of
> > those places.


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