Re: Postal address layouts?

[Aredridel]

On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 04:08, Pete French wrote:
> > Each sub-array is a line as it would appear on a letter. Entries startin=
> > g with "$" are interpreted as literal strings, everything else is a key =
> > into the data base. The proplist above contains all the possible keys.

How about being general:

((Mailing Info)
(Lesser Locale)(Greater Locale)(Postal Code)
(Country))

Where Mailing Info could be as many lines as needed.  In the US, but
where I don't get street delivery, I list my address thus:

   P.O. Box XXXX
   XXXX Streetname
   Township, ST 8XXXX
   USA

The first two lines would be "Mailing Info", then the township is the
"Lesser Locale", the state (abbreviated in the US) is the "Greater
Locale" and the Zip Code is the postal code, then country.

For an English address,

  Flat 5, Orchard House
  24 West Grove Street     (All that is Mailing Info)
  Everby, Milton Keynes    (Lesser Locale)
  Northamptonshire         (Greater Locale)
  MK1 2AB                  (Postal)
  United Kingdom           (Country)

One more useful idea might just be to have a heirarchy of (comma or
newline separated) locales:

  Everby, (smallest) Milton Keynes (next)
  Northamptonshire (greatest)

I'm not sure I've seen an address that doesn't fit that in any country's
post.

The reason I put the entire local routing information in a single field
is that I've never seen anyone sort or even query on those fields in a
way that a substring search wouldn't do equally (or more!) effectively.
(Also, postal codes usually encode the locality enough for collating for
mailing).

It's also the only thing flexible enough for those cranky, long English
and Bermudan addresses, and still succinct enough for the sometimes
abbreviated US addresses:

  Drop B
  Orem, UT 87445-9876

Or my own, where even the street address is totally superfluous, as the
postal code is all that's needed to get mail to me. (Post office boxes
in small towns work this way, often)

I'd think that with, say, five or six "locality" fields, you'd be fine
if you fill them shifted toward the greatest (so the rightmost (in
English) is the "State", "Province" or English county, the next is a
sublocale like an english mail center town if there is one, and the
third is a small locale like a village in england, or blank if there's
only two locality names in the address.

I'd not use a heirarchy of locales for the mailing info fields because
they're not in heirarchy order in many places -- in the US, the
apartment or suite number comes after the street address.

Ari

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