@david_chisnall

Another differentiating factor is the wavy red underline for misspelled words, with the implied meaning that unless you choose the right words, a diplomatic email could result in rivers of blood, or red ink. Being a metal head, I prefer the former, since a passionless life is the death of a million paper cutes.

@ashwin

Oh, there were a bunch of things like this.

For example, in Teams, you can type an at sign and then start someone's name and it will autocomplete their full name so you sound like an angry parent scolding a child. But, you can hit backspace. So someone wanting to address me as David does @Dav{tab}{backspace}.

But a lot of other cultures have very different conventions for names. Indian ones are a staggeringly bad fit for this, which is surprising for a company whose CEO is Indian. There's no way of both notifying an person and using their preferred form of address for a huge number of cases.

@PeterLudemann @david_chisnall @ashwin @Dav I started doing this in address forms that make the State/Province/Region field required:

ALT

@jernej__s @PeterLudemann @ashwin @Dav

Address boxes annoy me so much. In the UK, every postal address can be identified by two pieces of information:

The building name / number.
The postcode.

In any situation where this is not the case, the Royal Mail subdivides the postcode to make it true.

If you're building a system that accepts international addresses, you need to support a load of different things, but there are a bunch of forms I've filled in where they only accept UK addresses but make something like city or county mandatory.

@david_chisnall @PeterLudemann @ashwin @Dav I wouldn't be surprised if courier services need the city name – I've had problems in the past when I entered my exact post code instead of 1000 (which covers the whole city) when the item was being delivered by something other than Post.

@david_chisnall @jernej__s @ashwin @Dav
The Canadian postal code system (modelled on the UK system, enhanced to make typos difficult) can distinguish individual floors within a single building. The 9-digit US zip codes can probably do this also, but everybody uses the 5-digit version (the Canadian ones are all of the form V0R 2G0, with the only special encoding being that "0" in the 2nd position means it's a PO box).

[BTW, for a while I lived in Japan with an identical address for about a dozen houses; the only way to distinguish them was by the name of the addressee]

@PeterLudemann @jernej__s @ashwin @Dav

[BTW, for a while I lived in Japan with an identical address for about a dozen houses; the only way to distinguish them was by the name of the addressee]

France was like this until very recently. A load of roads had no name and neither did houses, so the only address information was village + name.

Over the last few years, they've been assigning names or numbers to every house and names to all of the tiny rural roads (with the controversy that you'd expect something like this to cause), so now every delivery address contains enough information to find it without knowing who lives where. I think their post codes just give you village-level granularity though, so you need that plus road plus house name / number to uniquely identify every postal address.

@jernej__s @PeterLudemann @ashwin @Dav

The Royal Mail's postcode database is available to buy (it's also free to query for limited purposes). A delivery service has no business operating if they don't buy a subscription to have access to the latest version.

If all that you need is the city, the first three or four digits will give you that. New postcodes share a common prefix with nearby ones, so it's quite easy to determine the city / town / village with a year-old copy of the database.

The bigger problem is companies using things like Google Maps for delivery, where they take a year or two to add new streets to their maps. The postcode will give them a rough area (the official database contains a set of OS Map coordinates for polygon that the postcode covers), but that doesn't help if their navigation system thinks there are no roads there.

When we moved in, the postcode was in the database before the house was completed. The road was on OpenStreetMap as under construction within a few weeks of planning permission being granted and had the under-construction markers removed once it was completed. It took Google and a few other commercial map vendors over a year to add it to their map. I got a lot of calls from delivery drivers saying 'I am nearby but your house doesn't exist' or some variation. And a shocking number of them were really, really bad at following directions.

@david_chisnall @jernej__s @ashwin @Dav
40 years ago, I wrote some programs that used the Canadian postal code database -- at the time, it was more-or-less free (I think we had to provide a magnetic tape) and easy to use. (Like the UK postal codes, the beginning letter-digit-letter gives a fairly small neighbourhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada#Number_of_possible_postal_codes)

@PeterLudemann @jernej__s @ashwin @Dav

Stop it, you're making me jealous of Canada again.