[whatwg] Supporting more address levels in autocomplete

[Nils Dagsson Moskopp]

Alex Bishop <alexbishop at gmail.com> writes:

> On 22/02/2014 04:05, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> The post office will deal with all kinds of stuff, sure. But Web forms
>> only have to accept the formal address format, which in the UK only ever
>> has a street, a locality (sometimes), a post town, and a post code.
>
> That’s all Royal Mail has to deal with, sure (with the possible addition 
> of a named building on a street, which almost always seems to merit its 
> own line), but don’t forget that there can be additional lines above 
> that for flat numbers, office departments, buildings on a site, etc. In 
> my experience, it’s not uncommon for business or university hall of 
> residence addresses to have two or three lines before the street part.

In Germany, forms do have something called „Adresszusatz“ (literally:
“address extension”), for everything more specific than name, street,
postal code, city. A company campus, for example, may have only one
postal address, but mail addressed to a specific division may contain
something like “building 3 entrance C”. A person temporarily reachable
by mail at someone else's place may have “c/o john doe”.

I personally experience problems because of this, as where I live only
the apartment number is on the mail box (administration forbids writing
one's own name on this) and mail often arrives late because of that.

Btw, do we have a collection of real world use cases for address forms?
One first thing that came to my mind for me is food delivery services,
which have to deal with addresses often and in a timely manner:

<http://www.lieferheld.de/> has a single input field for each of:
  - family name
  - company
  - street
  - house number
  - floor
  - postal code
  - city
  - special directions

<http://www.lieferando.de> has a single input field for each of:
  - given name
  - family name
  - street
  - house number
  - company
  - floor
  - further information

<http://pizza.de> has a single input field for each of:
  - company
  - company division
  - given name
  - family name
  - street
  - house number
  - postal code
  - city
  - backyard / floor / etc.

Based on my small sample, both “company” and “floor” seem to be
candidates for address completion. Also, every one of these forms has an
address extension field for further information, with different labels.

What would be an argument against generic address extension input fields
for free form text that does not fit into any other input field?

-- 
Nils Dagsson Moskopp // erlehmann
<http://dieweltistgarnichtso.net>