8 ms·

Dear American Website Owner

142 points by jwr 17y ago

cmelbye 17y ago
In what way are "American Website Owners" responsible for this problem? I've seen it plenty of times going in the other direction. Such a typical European way of thinking...
snitko 17y ago
It used to annoy me too. When I saw those forms, I usually assumed a website owner didn't want to talk to me anyway. But then I realized that's okay. US generally don't care for the rest of the world and I believe they have the right and the privilege to do so. So it's either I move to US or stop complaining. And US companies that, say, want my money - they usually have the right kind of forms already.
- acg 17y ago
  I disagree there's there's nothing wrong with wanting to raise web standards. More people should complain, we'd have a better web. Some sites still don't have encryption when entering credit card numbers.
  - cujo 17y ago
    Sure, but the design of a web form is hardly a standard.
    - nailer 17y ago
      I think being international is a standard of sorts. Eg: - handling international times (say, Feb 1 2007 rather than 01/02/07 or 02/01/07) - allowing people to enter their normal phone numbers and addresses - knowing that United Kingdom is preferred for addressing and Great Britain is not.
      - sigzero 17y ago
        I want to see the library and code that handles all of those possibilities.
        nailer 17y ago
        Ask a website nicely - 95% of them handle this fine. Or write it yourself.
awolf 17y ago
I wish author was a little more constructive here. What phone number pattern would he recommend we use?
- snitko 17y ago
  Why use any pattern? Let me enter the phone number in a way I got used to it and deal with it.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    There's a cost/benefit analysis to be done. People do make mistakes, and checking their submission against common patterns will save you lost sales. As suggested in a comment on a rant I wrote a few years ago, one strategy is to 'validate' against something reasonable, but instead of rejecting anything that fails, ask the user to confirm that they really do want something unexpected. I'm not sure that 'reasonable' would be for an international phone number, but whatever you pick based on the country they choose, let them override your validation.
    - jacoblyles 17y ago
      Well, I suppose you could just validate numbers from the most common countries you see and hope the rest don't make mistakes. Call it the Amdahl's law of internationalization.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Confirmation is OK, but taking a hard line is a no-no. I've had endless problems trying to jam my Irish mobile phone number (for a long time, my primary phone) into UK phone number fields.
  - sigzero 17y ago
    Ummm...no. Do you not see the problem with that reasoning?
    - Vivtek 17y ago
handelaar 17y ago
Dear everybody else: Some of us don't even have postal codes. Those profane-looking ones we enter aren't real. Love, Ireland.
- bitdiddle 17y ago
  But you have Guinness, or as you would say, beer. I'll trade any day.
- eagleal 17y ago
  At least you don't even have them. We (Albanians) have them, but neither the govt neither the professionals know about them!
edw519 17y ago
Dear Non-American Website User: You do not live in the United States of America. You think all American website owners are the same. And then you decide it might just be a good idea to lump the 95.4% who know what they're doing with those who don't. But you know, most American website owners are no more alike that most American <anything>. The moment you whine about the few to the many in a blog, two things do happen: - you irritate the people who know what they're doing - you don't reach the people you should If you don't like something about an American website, tell them, not the rest of us. That way, you're more likely to actually accomplish something. Which is, after all, the American way.
- Vivtek 17y ago
  Do you respond to other general advice to Website operators in the same way, or just to foreigners telling Americans what to do?
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    An interesting point about tone. If this had been pitched as "sites do international addresses wrong" as opposed to "Americans do it wrong!", there'd probably be less defensiveness, less snideness, less "typical American can't read", etc.
    - Vivtek 17y ago
      Look, I'm an American, and having lived elsewhere, I've been bitten many a time by this kind of thoughtless antipattern. And when I am, I don't think, "Oh my, this Web designer of uncertain origin didn't study his field," I curse, moan, and wail, "Stupid bleeping Americans have failed again to understand the complexity of their world!" I don't know where you're from, obviously, but having grown up in Indiana, I'm all too aware of the oblivious American nature, and I find the original post entirely justified in its tone. As far as I'm concerned, the defensiveness here is good ol' American exceptionalism at work, and anybody who wants to have global business had better get over that. I second or third the notion that a nice library would be a Good Thing.
Major_Grooves 17y ago
It can happen within countries too. Most UK websites will require you to enter a "county". That's fine in England, because England is divided in to lots of counties (e.g. Essex, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire etc.). However, Scotland does not have counties any more. They were abolished before I was even born and replaced with regions. It might sound nit-picking, but it's one of these things that adds to the chip on our shoulder that suggests folk in Engerland don't really care what is going on in the rest of the UK (I don't know how Wales and N.I. are organised).
- petercooper 17y ago
  They were abolished before I was even born and replaced with regions. And then, in 1996, "regions" were replaced with "council areas:" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_Scotland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_Scotland that adds to the chip on our shoulder that suggests folk in Engerland don't really care what is going on in the rest of the UK I suspect most in "Engerland" care as much about Scotland as the average Scot cares about English affairs (well, except for holding positions of power within our parliament).
- spatulon 17y ago
  FWIW, not all parts of England are in counties either, so don't feel like you're being singled out. York isn't in Yorkshire, for example. It is its own unitary authority. Even Amazon demands a county, so I put North Yorkshire. Close enough. The Royal Mail are happy for old curmudgeons and the like to use traditional counties in addresses, if they wish: http://www.abcounties.co.uk/bpa/bpacontents.htm http://www.abcounties.co.uk/bpa/bpacontents.htm All that Royal Mail cares about is your house number and postcode, so you could probably even get away with telling websites that you live in Wibbleton in Foobarshire.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    York isn't in Yorkshire, for example. It is its own unitary authority. Even Amazon demands a county, so I put North Yorkshire. Close enough. It's not just "close enough" - it's entirely correct. York is in the "ceremonial" or "geographical" county of North Yorkshire. And addresses are geographical references, after all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England (though, technically, you should probably just go with whatever the Royal Mail determines is valid)
petercooper 17y ago
all of which required me to provide a "State" name (I don't have one) As the author is in Poland, I'd argue that voivodeships are equivalent, in terms of being the highest level subdivision of the country. As a Brit, I'd tend to go with the county instead.
- Vivtek 17y ago
  How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? Edit on second thought: how about the vast majority of forms of this nature, which have a helpful dropdown list of the fifty valid states, and sometimes DC for the District of Columbia, but almost never PR for Puerto Rico, let alone Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the other areas of the world that the US Postal Service (and law) considers part of the United States? I lived in Puerto Rico for years, and this is an utterly rampant problem for millions of actual American citizens living in the United States, let alone the rest of the world, all due to the fact that most Americans don't know jack about the world they inhabit.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? "State" is really just equivalent to "second-level subdivision" (a bit like how "ZIP code" can mean "postal code" in general, as long as the box allows freeform input). Most countries don't call their second-level subdivisions "states" but counties, municipalities, council areas, and the like. Puerto Rico has municipalities and Japan has prefectures, for instance. the other areas of the world that the US Postal Service (and law) considers part of the United States? The places you mention are all unincorporated organized territories, meaning they are not considered to be "part of the United States proper." The word "proper" is somewhat important in this distinction, of course, and the USPS's definitions do nothing to help clear the waters on this one.. :-)
TomOfTTB 17y ago
Dear Foreigner, Okay it’s probably time to come clean. In reality the problem you highlight is all a secret plot to frustrate you and hence make you less effective and unable to compete with us in the global economy. We were all told to do so through coded messages that are embedded into episodes of American Idol (I bet you thought all that stuff Paula Abdul said was just drunken babbling) It’s all part of a far reaching plot by our government to subvert the rest of the world. Hence Google pulling out of China and the creation of Microsoft Windows (we secretly use a highly stable open solution and just use a keyboard shortcut to make it look like Windows when you walk into the room much like that fake looking spreadsheet that was embedded into the DOS version of Tetris) Sorry for the inconvenience (though not really as pointed out above), America
- cglee 17y ago
  How does this reply add value? The blog post presents a problem that I (being an American) rarely even think about. I wanted to see how others deal with this issue. WTF is this reply doing?
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    This is what your downvote button is for.
    - cglee 17y ago
      I did downvote, but at the time, the parent post had over 15 points and I wanted to know why.
  - gn 17y ago
    The idea that people other than Americans are real consumers with real money to spend is inherently funny; the idea that it might make good business sense to not put gratuitous hurdles between them and your checkout is practically hysterical. It's not like the US has an external trade deficit larger than the GDP of Taiwan or anything.
shadowsun7 17y ago
YES YES YES YES YES! I've always wondered about this. I once submitted a form saying that I wanted something delivered to New York, Singapore. Was very lucky that it even got delivered, much less sent to the right address.
mhb 17y ago
Is this the place to complain about other car drivers too?
Vivtek 17y ago
Dear German Website Owner (yeah, this works both ways) I do have a state in my postal address, and if I have to enter my address as 47374 Richmond instead of Richmond IN 47374, it will probably go to Virginia first, and maybe they'll get it to me eventually. Just saying. Internationalism is hard. If you want to go for the global market, it would behoove you to try to do it right.
- jwr 17y ago
  Absolutely — which is I would recommend providing multi-line edit boxes for addresses. That way you can enter your address any way you see fit. You really know best how to address mail so that it gets to you, why would I want to pretend I know better?
  - josefresco 17y ago
    Yeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.
    - vanschelven 17y ago
      It works very well for me. Provided the goal of the address field is to copy/paste it verbatim to an envelope - if you want to actually understand the different parts of the address this might be counterproductive.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    A lot of people use fields such as state and zip code for demographic data collection. A free form textbox makes that more difficult.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    So you have a strong AI doing natural-language parsing to figure out from that freeform address whether you need to charge sales tax/VAT? If you're doing business across state/province or national borders, getting that structured address data (and getting it right) can be awfully important.
Timmy_C 17y ago
I think this blog post REALLY overlooks the fact that interface localization isn't easy; even with a simple web forms. The interface for a search engine is a single input field with dynamic suggestions and people were in an uproar when Bing didn't give suggestions that were localized to the user's country or language. That's to say, if one of the biggest software companies in the world can't get it right, then what hope does the average web developer have?
- gn 17y ago
  Not every aspect of this is easy, true, but that's no reason not to tackle the ones that are. It's trivial to simply not require a state or a postcode or try to verify a phone no if the user selects a country other than the US. There should be a library for this. We have libraries that can handle the insanely capricious details of DST for all countries and subnational entities on the planet; we should have no problem providing one list of states and two regular expressions per nation. (I know it's more or less impossible to reliably catch (e.g.) invalid UK postcodes, but we wouldn't have to. We'd mainly want to catch obvious typos without making things needlessly hard for customers overseas.)
  - Timmy_C 17y ago
    Wufoo is pretty good for pre-made forms. And they advertise that they can do US and International phone, mail and currency fields.
- jwr 17y ago
  If I wanted to write a blog post which elaborated on all possible internationalization issues, it would become a PhD dissertation and take a year to write. And then it wouldn't even touch on all the issues. You have to start somewhere — and let's face it, dealing with the two silly problems I mentioned would get us 80% of the way there.
  - jasonlotito 17y ago
    I had to deal with International phone numbers before. Obviously, I had to deal with other issues, too, but the phone number was the important piece. Early on, before PayPal or other services caught on, we created a system to verify credit card users with their telephone. They would enter their telephone number and we'd call them. It was simple. The problem was with international users. The system was simple: it would call the exact phone number the user entered. This meant we really wanted to get it right the first time. The other problem was that we had a single call center setup out in New York. This meant international callers needed to be called with special country codes and what not. Now, I feel it's safe to say if you ask someone in Europe to give their phone number, they are going to give their phone number like they would to any of their friends. They aren't going to enter in the country code, and they aren't going to know to prefix it with a special code so that an automated system from the US can call them. The thing is, it's not fair for me to simply provide them with the requirement "Give us your phone number so we can call you from New York, USA." It really isn't professional. So, I spent some time (lots of time) reading up and learning about international phone numbers, and coding together a system that went a long way toward fixing this problem. A user could enter in their phone number, and if they didn't enter in a country code, we'd be intelligent about it and add it for them. How did we know where they lived? Two sources: CC Info and the IP address. We could be intelligent and assume the two should mostly match up. Obviously, if the CC address was the US, and the IP was somewhere off in Asia, red flags beyond just the errors for phone numbers would popup (but, even then, you had to be careful!). I spent a lot of time fine tuning the system, working hard to make sure that a phone number would get through however the user entered it, and we could call. We had a really good success rate with numbers outside the North American norm. Enough that the cases that did fail I couldn't even figure out manually. I was a bit saddened that it was all for nothing when we eventually removed the 'feature.' and the requirement for a phone number. I understand the reasons, but from a problem solving point of view, it was a lot of fun.
cwbrandsma 17y ago
Actually, as a web site owner, for a number of my sites, they are INTENTIONALLY USA only. Sorry that you happened to stumble across them, but I either do not care about your business, don't want to deal with the hassle (international shipped, phone, regulations, etc), or legally cannot serve your area.
- Vivtek 17y ago
  I'm pretty sure this criticism is not leveled at your sites, which doubtlessly have nowhere to enter a country, either. But if they have a space for your country but don't make it possible to enter foreign addresses, which is very often the case, then the operator has a problem and should probably think a little harder about their data structures and form layout.
- tosiabunio 17y ago
  Acually, as typical American, you are unable to read and understand such short text. It is directed to those website owners who do want to deal with the hassle you don't care about. "The moment you put a "country" field in your form, two things should happen:" - that sentence should give you a clue.
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    "Acually, as typical American" It helps, when mocking a people, to convey such mockery through proper use of their language. ;) More seriously, there's no need to douche up the conversation by throwing around slurs against nationalities. EDIT: Apparently people disagree on that need. Ah, well.
lutorm 17y ago
What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on numbers.
- dionidium 17y ago
  What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? No. Zip codes may cross state lines.
  - joshfinnie 17y ago
    I am not sure that is completely true. I thought ZIP codes could not cross state lines (at least in the US). And after looking at them, I couldn't find any that were not unique.[http://www.aggdata.com/free/zip-code http://www.aggdata.com/free/zip-code] Edit: Sorry, There are a few that cross state lines, when using the first two digits as the state code. However, each ZIP code is unique to a town; therefore, one could use it in the above scenario.
    - showerst 17y ago
      Wikipedia used to have a list of them, I remember there being at least 5, possibly more.
      - tokenadult 17y ago
        Google brought me to this article; I'm showing the jump to near where the issue is mentioned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography
    - freiheit 17y ago
      "Each ZIP code is unique to a town"? No, not really. Small towns without their own post office typically share a ZIP code with the closest city because that's where the post office that delivers their mail is.
Tycho 17y ago
And fix those drop-down menus for country where I have to scroll allllll....the.....waaaaay....dowwwwwwn to reach United Kingdom!
- Timmy_C 17y ago
  If it's an HTML <select> element then you can click it to give it focus then start typing the name of option you wish to select.
  - mooism2 17y ago
    But it would be easier for the customer if the website guessed from the customer's IP address which country they were in, and put it at the top of the list (as well as in its normal position).
    - Timmy_C 17y ago
      That sounds like a good little usability trick. I might do that next time I have a countries dropdown in a form.
    - joshd 17y ago
      My favourite are the dropdowns that place "popular" countries at the top. This means that if I scroll through the list then my country may or may not be where I expect it based on how the developer was feeling that day.
febeling 17y ago
Once you start to look at the problem, it becomes really hard. It is not only address and phone number formats. The name alone a very hard. American style is given name and family name I guess, and as a German that sounds very convincing. But then you suddenly stumble across a middle initial, whereas in Germany parents give their kids any number of additional forenames, from zero to five or so, not just one for the middle. Then countries like Spain and Iceland traditionally don't have a family name, but surnames derived from the father or the mother, or just the surname from both in a certain order. You have potentially two family-level names then (and potentially the same name twice!). So the person complaining in the blog post probably doesn't know what it means to get these things right, even if you only consider highly developed countries. Even if you only want the name. Maybe someone should start a library for this problem, and then we all lay back and watch it grow to 50,000 LOC.
njharman 17y ago
I've argued many times for making address one big text field. Let people who live in the country, who own the address, format it how they know it should be formatted.
- Deestan 17y ago
  Me too! I've been arguing this for years, and I have yet for someone to reply with a good reason why it shouldn't be handled this way. Bad reasons given: - Safeguard against users who can't be relied on to format their own address properly. Fix 1: Don't worry about that. Fix 2: If you really want this, leave the rest of us an option to use a freeform address instead. - "Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.
  - zeeone 17y ago
    The only reason I can think of is for internal statistics. For example the website owner can run a report on their customers broken down by a state or country. Nowadays with GeoIP, this is obsolete.
    - imajes 17y ago
      what if the destination/shipping is different to the billing, or where you buy it from? Using geoip here is mostly irrelevant and incredibly dangerous if you want to get a strong opinion of who your customers actually are, as opposed to where they are buying it from.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    '"Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.' Or let the app first sort out the raw input, make sure it makes sense, then pass it on to the database. I can see wanting to have fine-grained table fields. But I don't like seeing the schema drive the model or the UI. A single textarea really is a strong idea (and like others here have been advocating it fr a few years with mixed results). Seems like these are the sort of mundane tasks computers should be good at. Let humans be quirky and let computers sort it out. Prompt for confirmation as needed.
pixelbath 17y ago
We've been told for years that database normalization is good. Removing data redundancy is good. This is one reason forms are broken into so many separate fields as discretely as possible. That said, once a company decides to do business outside their country of origin, some serious rethinking of customer-facing forms (and fields, if applicable) is in order.
jwr 17y ago
I should probably clarify something, given how heated the discussion is becoming. I could have written the same thing as a nerdy techie article, pointing out flaws in input validation. Do you think this would have gotten my point across? How many people would have read that article? Would it have made it to Hacker News? Look: this is not a rant about Americans. It just so happens that US has developed most of the internet as we know it and it just so happens that most of e-commerce happens there. I'm sure any number of websites in other countries are guilty of similar sins, but you have to start somewhere. The point is, we should start thinking more carefully about how we validate forms and store user data in that "global economy" everyone is bragging about.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  "Would it have made it to Hacker News?" Heaven knows, we never see nerdy, technical material on this site. Are you trying to "clarify" or "justify"? EDIT: Serious question. At the same time you're saying "this is not a rant about Americans", you're also saying but none of you would have paid attention if I hadn't made it one.
- rohsh 17y ago
  I think on some level this is a rant about Americans, even if you didn't intend it to be one. My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do. I would bet money on the same being true for Brazilians and Australians. I would bet money on Japanese people being aware of the fact that not every country is partitioned into prefectures. Maybe this is because Indians, Germans etc. are not socialized to see their way of running a nation as the only way, at least not in the way Americans are. Maybe not. In any case it's a nice demonstration of how collective cultural ignorance leads to annoyed visitors and, one might presume, lost sales.
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    "My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do" Apparently not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232278
rglullis 17y ago
I thought we already knew this whole web2.0 thingie is more than rounded corners. It's the "web services and integration" that's interesting. There is more than one service offering a geocoding API. Use any of them to do the hard work for you. Your form should have one single field, named "Address". Let the user type whatever s/he wants. Get this input and pass it along to Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps, or WhateverMaps. Your geocoding service will return things in a way that is obviously more parseable.
lkjhgvbnm 17y ago
while we are on the topic can we lose the dropdown list of 196 countries you got from the ISO table? Seriously, how many products have you shipped to Afghanistan or Albania but you make everyone scroll past these to get to the only country you actually deliver to (+ Canada if you're lucky)
biafra 17y ago
Also annoying are email address parsers that don't accept .name Domains.
nkassis 17y ago
I've had that issue with a Department of Education website, I moved to Canada for a second degree recently and I was unable to set my address with them to here because of the state field not resetting when I select Canada. I agree with this article, if you set a country other than USA, the state field should go away or better, don't preselect the US and add the field later.
cstross 17y ago
Oh, it gets worse fast. I hate street address validators that insist you live in a house or apartment with a number on a given street. Because? I live in flat m at street number n on Foo Street. Here in Scotland -- where I live -- there are three ways to put this on an envelope, all recognized by the post office: Flat m, n Foo Street m/n Foo Street (this is the one in the Post Office postcode lookup database) Flat xFy n Foo Street (where y is floor number and x is apartment number on that floor, e.g. 3F2, 12 High Street) ... So why do so many Javascript address validators throw out m/n or xFy format addresses for having an illegal character in the middle? Including British ones, that back onto the official Post Office lookup database? Address formats aren't standardized internationally. They aren't even standardized within countries with a unified postal service.
apinstein 17y ago
Not sure how many people have tried to actually make international address forms, but it's really difficult. Despite a lot of searching, I have yet to find any web site or book or library that can handle all international addresses properly while still letting you validate that the data is reasonable (city/state/postal code) etc. It's not that American-run web sites don't want to support international formats, but when 95% of your business is from America, it just doesn't make business sense to deal with the complexity of international addresses for 5% of your revenues. I'd love it if someone can point me to a library/book/tutorial of the appropriate way to handle this situation. NOTE: I haven't looked that recently, but did about a year ago.
Daniel_Newby 17y ago
If you have a free-form field, how often to people screw up their own address or phone number? And if you alienate them, does your support cost go up or down?

142 points by jwr 17y ago

In what way are "American Website Owners" responsible for this problem? I've seen it plenty of times going in the other direction. Such a typical European way of thinking...

snitko 17y ago

It used to annoy me too. When I saw those forms, I usually assumed a website owner didn't want to talk to me anyway. But then I realized that's okay. US generally don't care for the rest of the world and I believe they have the right and the privilege to do so. So it's either I move to US or stop complaining. And US companies that, say, want my money - they usually have the right kind of forms already.

acg 17y ago
I disagree there's there's nothing wrong with wanting to raise web standards. More people should complain, we'd have a better web. Some sites still don't have encryption when entering credit card numbers.
- cujo 17y ago
  Sure, but the design of a web form is hardly a standard.
  - nailer 17y ago
    I think being international is a standard of sorts. Eg: - handling international times (say, Feb 1 2007 rather than 01/02/07 or 02/01/07) - allowing people to enter their normal phone numbers and addresses - knowing that United Kingdom is preferred for addressing and Great Britain is not.
    - sigzero 17y ago
      I want to see the library and code that handles all of those possibilities.
      - nailer 17y ago
        Ask a website nicely - 95% of them handle this fine. Or write it yourself.

awolf 17y ago

I wish author was a little more constructive here. What phone number pattern would he recommend we use?

snitko 17y ago
Why use any pattern? Let me enter the phone number in a way I got used to it and deal with it.
- raganwald 17y ago
  There's a cost/benefit analysis to be done. People do make mistakes, and checking their submission against common patterns will save you lost sales. As suggested in a comment on a rant I wrote a few years ago, one strategy is to 'validate' against something reasonable, but instead of rejecting anything that fails, ask the user to confirm that they really do want something unexpected. I'm not sure that 'reasonable' would be for an international phone number, but whatever you pick based on the country they choose, let them override your validation.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    Well, I suppose you could just validate numbers from the most common countries you see and hope the rest don't make mistakes. Call it the Amdahl's law of internationalization.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Confirmation is OK, but taking a hard line is a no-no. I've had endless problems trying to jam my Irish mobile phone number (for a long time, my primary phone) into UK phone number fields.
- sigzero 17y ago
  Ummm...no. Do you not see the problem with that reasoning?
  - Vivtek 17y ago

handelaar 17y ago

Dear everybody else: Some of us don't even have postal codes. Those profane-looking ones we enter aren't real. Love, Ireland.

bitdiddle 17y ago
But you have Guinness, or as you would say, beer. I'll trade any day.
eagleal 17y ago
At least you don't even have them. We (Albanians) have them, but neither the govt neither the professionals know about them!

edw519 17y ago

Dear Non-American Website User: You do not live in the United States of America. You think all American website owners are the same. And then you decide it might just be a good idea to lump the 95.4% who know what they're doing with those who don't. But you know, most American website owners are no more alike that most American <anything>. The moment you whine about the few to the many in a blog, two things do happen: - you irritate the people who know what they're doing - you don't reach the people you should If you don't like something about an American website, tell them, not the rest of us. That way, you're more likely to actually accomplish something. Which is, after all, the American way.

Vivtek 17y ago
Do you respond to other general advice to Website operators in the same way, or just to foreigners telling Americans what to do?
- Semiapies 17y ago
  An interesting point about tone. If this had been pitched as "sites do international addresses wrong" as opposed to "Americans do it wrong!", there'd probably be less defensiveness, less snideness, less "typical American can't read", etc.
  - Vivtek 17y ago
    Look, I'm an American, and having lived elsewhere, I've been bitten many a time by this kind of thoughtless antipattern. And when I am, I don't think, "Oh my, this Web designer of uncertain origin didn't study his field," I curse, moan, and wail, "Stupid bleeping Americans have failed again to understand the complexity of their world!" I don't know where you're from, obviously, but having grown up in Indiana, I'm all too aware of the oblivious American nature, and I find the original post entirely justified in its tone. As far as I'm concerned, the defensiveness here is good ol' American exceptionalism at work, and anybody who wants to have global business had better get over that. I second or third the notion that a nice library would be a Good Thing.

Major_Grooves 17y ago

It can happen within countries too. Most UK websites will require you to enter a "county". That's fine in England, because England is divided in to lots of counties (e.g. Essex, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire etc.). However, Scotland does not have counties any more. They were abolished before I was even born and replaced with regions. It might sound nit-picking, but it's one of these things that adds to the chip on our shoulder that suggests folk in Engerland don't really care what is going on in the rest of the UK (I don't know how Wales and N.I. are organised).

petercooper 17y ago
They were abolished before I was even born and replaced with regions. And then, in 1996, "regions" were replaced with "council areas:" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_Scotland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_Scotland that adds to the chip on our shoulder that suggests folk in Engerland don't really care what is going on in the rest of the UK I suspect most in "Engerland" care as much about Scotland as the average Scot cares about English affairs (well, except for holding positions of power within our parliament).
spatulon 17y ago
FWIW, not all parts of England are in counties either, so don't feel like you're being singled out. York isn't in Yorkshire, for example. It is its own unitary authority. Even Amazon demands a county, so I put North Yorkshire. Close enough. The Royal Mail are happy for old curmudgeons and the like to use traditional counties in addresses, if they wish: http://www.abcounties.co.uk/bpa/bpacontents.htm http://www.abcounties.co.uk/bpa/bpacontents.htm All that Royal Mail cares about is your house number and postcode, so you could probably even get away with telling websites that you live in Wibbleton in Foobarshire.
- petercooper 17y ago
  York isn't in Yorkshire, for example. It is its own unitary authority. Even Amazon demands a county, so I put North Yorkshire. Close enough. It's not just "close enough" - it's entirely correct. York is in the "ceremonial" or "geographical" county of North Yorkshire. And addresses are geographical references, after all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England (though, technically, you should probably just go with whatever the Royal Mail determines is valid)

petercooper 17y ago

all of which required me to provide a "State" name (I don't have one) As the author is in Poland, I'd argue that voivodeships are equivalent, in terms of being the highest level subdivision of the country. As a Brit, I'd tend to go with the county instead.

Vivtek 17y ago
How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? Edit on second thought: how about the vast majority of forms of this nature, which have a helpful dropdown list of the fifty valid states, and sometimes DC for the District of Columbia, but almost never PR for Puerto Rico, let alone Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the other areas of the world that the US Postal Service (and law) considers part of the United States? I lived in Puerto Rico for years, and this is an utterly rampant problem for millions of actual American citizens living in the United States, let alone the rest of the world, all due to the fact that most Americans don't know jack about the world they inhabit.
- petercooper 17y ago
  How about Puerto Rico (in those cases where Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of a state-like entity, which is how the US Postal Service treats it)? Hungary? Japan? Germany? Anywhere else that doesn't use a state in the postal address? "State" is really just equivalent to "second-level subdivision" (a bit like how "ZIP code" can mean "postal code" in general, as long as the box allows freeform input). Most countries don't call their second-level subdivisions "states" but counties, municipalities, council areas, and the like. Puerto Rico has municipalities and Japan has prefectures, for instance. the other areas of the world that the US Postal Service (and law) considers part of the United States? The places you mention are all unincorporated organized territories, meaning they are not considered to be "part of the United States proper." The word "proper" is somewhat important in this distinction, of course, and the USPS's definitions do nothing to help clear the waters on this one.. :-)

TomOfTTB 17y ago

Dear Foreigner, Okay it’s probably time to come clean. In reality the problem you highlight is all a secret plot to frustrate you and hence make you less effective and unable to compete with us in the global economy. We were all told to do so through coded messages that are embedded into episodes of American Idol (I bet you thought all that stuff Paula Abdul said was just drunken babbling) It’s all part of a far reaching plot by our government to subvert the rest of the world. Hence Google pulling out of China and the creation of Microsoft Windows (we secretly use a highly stable open solution and just use a keyboard shortcut to make it look like Windows when you walk into the room much like that fake looking spreadsheet that was embedded into the DOS version of Tetris) Sorry for the inconvenience (though not really as pointed out above), America

cglee 17y ago
How does this reply add value? The blog post presents a problem that I (being an American) rarely even think about. I wanted to see how others deal with this issue. WTF is this reply doing?
- Semiapies 17y ago
  This is what your downvote button is for.
  - cglee 17y ago
    I did downvote, but at the time, the parent post had over 15 points and I wanted to know why.
- gn 17y ago
  The idea that people other than Americans are real consumers with real money to spend is inherently funny; the idea that it might make good business sense to not put gratuitous hurdles between them and your checkout is practically hysterical. It's not like the US has an external trade deficit larger than the GDP of Taiwan or anything.

shadowsun7 17y ago

YES YES YES YES YES! I've always wondered about this. I once submitted a form saying that I wanted something delivered to New York, Singapore. Was very lucky that it even got delivered, much less sent to the right address.

mhb 17y ago

Is this the place to complain about other car drivers too?

Vivtek 17y ago

Dear German Website Owner (yeah, this works both ways) I do have a state in my postal address, and if I have to enter my address as 47374 Richmond instead of Richmond IN 47374, it will probably go to Virginia first, and maybe they'll get it to me eventually. Just saying. Internationalism is hard. If you want to go for the global market, it would behoove you to try to do it right.

jwr 17y ago
Absolutely — which is I would recommend providing multi-line edit boxes for addresses. That way you can enter your address any way you see fit. You really know best how to address mail so that it gets to you, why would I want to pretend I know better?
- josefresco 17y ago
  Yeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.
  - vanschelven 17y ago
    It works very well for me. Provided the goal of the address field is to copy/paste it verbatim to an envelope - if you want to actually understand the different parts of the address this might be counterproductive.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  A lot of people use fields such as state and zip code for demographic data collection. A free form textbox makes that more difficult.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  So you have a strong AI doing natural-language parsing to figure out from that freeform address whether you need to charge sales tax/VAT? If you're doing business across state/province or national borders, getting that structured address data (and getting it right) can be awfully important.

Timmy_C 17y ago

I think this blog post REALLY overlooks the fact that interface localization isn't easy; even with a simple web forms. The interface for a search engine is a single input field with dynamic suggestions and people were in an uproar when Bing didn't give suggestions that were localized to the user's country or language. That's to say, if one of the biggest software companies in the world can't get it right, then what hope does the average web developer have?

gn 17y ago
Not every aspect of this is easy, true, but that's no reason not to tackle the ones that are. It's trivial to simply not require a state or a postcode or try to verify a phone no if the user selects a country other than the US. There should be a library for this. We have libraries that can handle the insanely capricious details of DST for all countries and subnational entities on the planet; we should have no problem providing one list of states and two regular expressions per nation. (I know it's more or less impossible to reliably catch (e.g.) invalid UK postcodes, but we wouldn't have to. We'd mainly want to catch obvious typos without making things needlessly hard for customers overseas.)
- Timmy_C 17y ago
  Wufoo is pretty good for pre-made forms. And they advertise that they can do US and International phone, mail and currency fields.
jwr 17y ago
If I wanted to write a blog post which elaborated on all possible internationalization issues, it would become a PhD dissertation and take a year to write. And then it wouldn't even touch on all the issues. You have to start somewhere — and let's face it, dealing with the two silly problems I mentioned would get us 80% of the way there.
- jasonlotito 17y ago
  I had to deal with International phone numbers before. Obviously, I had to deal with other issues, too, but the phone number was the important piece. Early on, before PayPal or other services caught on, we created a system to verify credit card users with their telephone. They would enter their telephone number and we'd call them. It was simple. The problem was with international users. The system was simple: it would call the exact phone number the user entered. This meant we really wanted to get it right the first time. The other problem was that we had a single call center setup out in New York. This meant international callers needed to be called with special country codes and what not. Now, I feel it's safe to say if you ask someone in Europe to give their phone number, they are going to give their phone number like they would to any of their friends. They aren't going to enter in the country code, and they aren't going to know to prefix it with a special code so that an automated system from the US can call them. The thing is, it's not fair for me to simply provide them with the requirement "Give us your phone number so we can call you from New York, USA." It really isn't professional. So, I spent some time (lots of time) reading up and learning about international phone numbers, and coding together a system that went a long way toward fixing this problem. A user could enter in their phone number, and if they didn't enter in a country code, we'd be intelligent about it and add it for them. How did we know where they lived? Two sources: CC Info and the IP address. We could be intelligent and assume the two should mostly match up. Obviously, if the CC address was the US, and the IP was somewhere off in Asia, red flags beyond just the errors for phone numbers would popup (but, even then, you had to be careful!). I spent a lot of time fine tuning the system, working hard to make sure that a phone number would get through however the user entered it, and we could call. We had a really good success rate with numbers outside the North American norm. Enough that the cases that did fail I couldn't even figure out manually. I was a bit saddened that it was all for nothing when we eventually removed the 'feature.' and the requirement for a phone number. I understand the reasons, but from a problem solving point of view, it was a lot of fun.

cwbrandsma 17y ago

Actually, as a web site owner, for a number of my sites, they are INTENTIONALLY USA only. Sorry that you happened to stumble across them, but I either do not care about your business, don't want to deal with the hassle (international shipped, phone, regulations, etc), or legally cannot serve your area.

Vivtek 17y ago
I'm pretty sure this criticism is not leveled at your sites, which doubtlessly have nowhere to enter a country, either. But if they have a space for your country but don't make it possible to enter foreign addresses, which is very often the case, then the operator has a problem and should probably think a little harder about their data structures and form layout.
tosiabunio 17y ago
Acually, as typical American, you are unable to read and understand such short text. It is directed to those website owners who do want to deal with the hassle you don't care about. "The moment you put a "country" field in your form, two things should happen:" - that sentence should give you a clue.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  "Acually, as typical American" It helps, when mocking a people, to convey such mockery through proper use of their language. ;) More seriously, there's no need to douche up the conversation by throwing around slurs against nationalities. EDIT: Apparently people disagree on that need. Ah, well.

lutorm 17y ago

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on numbers.

dionidium 17y ago
What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? No. Zip codes may cross state lines.
- joshfinnie 17y ago
  I am not sure that is completely true. I thought ZIP codes could not cross state lines (at least in the US). And after looking at them, I couldn't find any that were not unique.[http://www.aggdata.com/free/zip-code http://www.aggdata.com/free/zip-code] Edit: Sorry, There are a few that cross state lines, when using the first two digits as the state code. However, each ZIP code is unique to a town; therefore, one could use it in the above scenario.
  - showerst 17y ago
    Wikipedia used to have a list of them, I remember there being at least 5, possibly more.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      Google brought me to this article; I'm showing the jump to near where the issue is mentioned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography
  - freiheit 17y ago
    "Each ZIP code is unique to a town"? No, not really. Small towns without their own post office typically share a ZIP code with the closest city because that's where the post office that delivers their mail is.

Tycho 17y ago

And fix those drop-down menus for country where I have to scroll allllll....the.....waaaaay....dowwwwwwn to reach United Kingdom!

Timmy_C 17y ago
If it's an HTML <select> element then you can click it to give it focus then start typing the name of option you wish to select.
- mooism2 17y ago
  But it would be easier for the customer if the website guessed from the customer's IP address which country they were in, and put it at the top of the list (as well as in its normal position).
  - Timmy_C 17y ago
    That sounds like a good little usability trick. I might do that next time I have a countries dropdown in a form.
  - joshd 17y ago
    My favourite are the dropdowns that place "popular" countries at the top. This means that if I scroll through the list then my country may or may not be where I expect it based on how the developer was feeling that day.

febeling 17y ago

Once you start to look at the problem, it becomes really hard. It is not only address and phone number formats. The name alone a very hard. American style is given name and family name I guess, and as a German that sounds very convincing. But then you suddenly stumble across a middle initial, whereas in Germany parents give their kids any number of additional forenames, from zero to five or so, not just one for the middle. Then countries like Spain and Iceland traditionally don't have a family name, but surnames derived from the father or the mother, or just the surname from both in a certain order. You have potentially two family-level names then (and potentially the same name twice!). So the person complaining in the blog post probably doesn't know what it means to get these things right, even if you only consider highly developed countries. Even if you only want the name. Maybe someone should start a library for this problem, and then we all lay back and watch it grow to 50,000 LOC.

njharman 17y ago

I've argued many times for making address one big text field. Let people who live in the country, who own the address, format it how they know it should be formatted.

Deestan 17y ago
Me too! I've been arguing this for years, and I have yet for someone to reply with a good reason why it shouldn't be handled this way. Bad reasons given: - Safeguard against users who can't be relied on to format their own address properly. Fix 1: Don't worry about that. Fix 2: If you really want this, leave the rest of us an option to use a freeform address instead. - "Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.
- zeeone 17y ago
  The only reason I can think of is for internal statistics. For example the website owner can run a report on their customers broken down by a state or country. Nowadays with GeoIP, this is obsolete.
  - imajes 17y ago
    what if the destination/shipping is different to the billing, or where you buy it from? Using geoip here is mostly irrelevant and incredibly dangerous if you want to get a strong opinion of who your customers actually are, as opposed to where they are buying it from.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  '"Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.' Or let the app first sort out the raw input, make sure it makes sense, then pass it on to the database. I can see wanting to have fine-grained table fields. But I don't like seeing the schema drive the model or the UI. A single textarea really is a strong idea (and like others here have been advocating it fr a few years with mixed results). Seems like these are the sort of mundane tasks computers should be good at. Let humans be quirky and let computers sort it out. Prompt for confirmation as needed.

pixelbath 17y ago

We've been told for years that database normalization is good. Removing data redundancy is good. This is one reason forms are broken into so many separate fields as discretely as possible. That said, once a company decides to do business outside their country of origin, some serious rethinking of customer-facing forms (and fields, if applicable) is in order.

jwr 17y ago

I should probably clarify something, given how heated the discussion is becoming. I could have written the same thing as a nerdy techie article, pointing out flaws in input validation. Do you think this would have gotten my point across? How many people would have read that article? Would it have made it to Hacker News? Look: this is not a rant about Americans. It just so happens that US has developed most of the internet as we know it and it just so happens that most of e-commerce happens there. I'm sure any number of websites in other countries are guilty of similar sins, but you have to start somewhere. The point is, we should start thinking more carefully about how we validate forms and store user data in that "global economy" everyone is bragging about.

Semiapies 17y ago
"Would it have made it to Hacker News?" Heaven knows, we never see nerdy, technical material on this site. Are you trying to "clarify" or "justify"? EDIT: Serious question. At the same time you're saying "this is not a rant about Americans", you're also saying but none of you would have paid attention if I hadn't made it one.
rohsh 17y ago
I think on some level this is a rant about Americans, even if you didn't intend it to be one. My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do. I would bet money on the same being true for Brazilians and Australians. I would bet money on Japanese people being aware of the fact that not every country is partitioned into prefectures. Maybe this is because Indians, Germans etc. are not socialized to see their way of running a nation as the only way, at least not in the way Americans are. Maybe not. In any case it's a nice demonstration of how collective cultural ignorance leads to annoyed visitors and, one might presume, lost sales.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  "My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do" Apparently not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232278

rglullis 17y ago

I thought we already knew this whole web2.0 thingie is more than rounded corners. It's the "web services and integration" that's interesting. There is more than one service offering a geocoding API. Use any of them to do the hard work for you. Your form should have one single field, named "Address". Let the user type whatever s/he wants. Get this input and pass it along to Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps, or WhateverMaps. Your geocoding service will return things in a way that is obviously more parseable.

lkjhgvbnm 17y ago

while we are on the topic can we lose the dropdown list of 196 countries you got from the ISO table? Seriously, how many products have you shipped to Afghanistan or Albania but you make everyone scroll past these to get to the only country you actually deliver to (+ Canada if you're lucky)

biafra 17y ago

Also annoying are email address parsers that don't accept .name Domains.

nkassis 17y ago

I've had that issue with a Department of Education website, I moved to Canada for a second degree recently and I was unable to set my address with them to here because of the state field not resetting when I select Canada. I agree with this article, if you set a country other than USA, the state field should go away or better, don't preselect the US and add the field later.

cstross 17y ago

Oh, it gets worse fast. I hate street address validators that insist you live in a house or apartment with a number on a given street. Because? I live in flat m at street number n on Foo Street. Here in Scotland -- where I live -- there are three ways to put this on an envelope, all recognized by the post office: Flat m, n Foo Street m/n Foo Street (this is the one in the Post Office postcode lookup database) Flat xFy n Foo Street (where y is floor number and x is apartment number on that floor, e.g. 3F2, 12 High Street) ... So why do so many Javascript address validators throw out m/n or xFy format addresses for having an illegal character in the middle? Including British ones, that back onto the official Post Office lookup database? Address formats aren't standardized internationally. They aren't even standardized within countries with a unified postal service.

apinstein 17y ago

Not sure how many people have tried to actually make international address forms, but it's really difficult. Despite a lot of searching, I have yet to find any web site or book or library that can handle all international addresses properly while still letting you validate that the data is reasonable (city/state/postal code) etc. It's not that American-run web sites don't want to support international formats, but when 95% of your business is from America, it just doesn't make business sense to deal with the complexity of international addresses for 5% of your revenues. I'd love it if someone can point me to a library/book/tutorial of the appropriate way to handle this situation. NOTE: I haven't looked that recently, but did about a year ago.

Daniel_Newby 17y ago

If you have a free-form field, how often to people screw up their own address or phone number? And if you alienate them, does your support cost go up or down?