I agree with the author almost fully. My main objection is that country should still come first, because postal codes aren’t global—but they acknowledge that lower down on that page.
Yes, the country plus postal code combo will be enough to figure out most of an address, and I’m always yelling at forms online for not taking advantage of this. In the United States, a 9-digit ZIP code can basically send someone to your door—or at least in direct line of sight of it.
However, as someone who builds forms for a living I never, ever build an address form from scratch, and I usually rely on a Drupal module that does it for me, which would be easy to manipulate, or I’m at the mercy of an address form provided by a payment processor—and good luck manipulating that one.
It’s hard to break the existing paradigm, by which forms are built around the way addresses are laid out on an envelope, which is country-specific and sometimes makes absolutely no sense, but it might be time to try.
But here are my other pet peeves:
- Dropdowns that list US states as their abbreviations, but still alphabetized by their full names (ME before MA)
- The reverse: US states listed in full, but alphabetized by their abbreviations (Massachusetts before Maine)
- And the absolute worst: international dialing codes keyed by code rather than country, resulting in my US number showing up as being from Antigua and Barbuda, and my Italian number as being from the Holy See
As. If.