On name & address madness
A long time ago, in a university far far away, I had a crazy Relational Database professor. This man was under the impression that data should be normalized at any and all cost, to infinity and beyond. In some cases, he had a point. When he started talking about normalizing names and addresses, I had to suppress murderous tendencies. You see, he seemed to be under the impression that it's always a Good Idea to split an address into different chunks. You know the drill: street, post code, city, country. Or worse, add a house number. Or worse, states, counties & provinces. Maybe regions, too. And before you know it you end up with a monstrosity of a data model that's broken beyond repair. There are many different addressing systems out there. To the point that Wikipedia has a page devoted to them, some of which are too complex to explain on that single page. The Japanese one is particularly interesting. I'm sure someone out there is nuts enough to create a model that encompassess all of these many & varied possibilities, but not I.
Generally speaking, addresses are used to send snail mail. If that's the only reason you need them in your application, then a simple text string will do. I'm sure users from Country X are quite capable of entering their address in a sensible format. When people want stuff delivered, they'll make sure the address is properly formatted. If you need to do silly things like calculate shipping costs, then there's no harm in asking the user for their country seperately, or even their locality within that country. Instead of having a dozen fields, you'll have 2 or 3, which is much simpler to work with for users, and it won't drive developers insane.
And then there's names. They're even worse. "First name", "last name". If I had a penny for every time I came across a form asking me for two parts of my name, I'd be bleedin' rich. Let's start with the obvious: not everyone has two names. In fact, until relatively recent in history, most western people only had one name. Only when Napoleon decreed in 1811 (!) that everyone under his rule ought to have a last name did people take on "actual" last names. Before then, John was simply John. If you didn't know which John exactly, then "John son of the butchers by the church". Not every culture uses the same sort order for first name & last name. In Japan, the family name comes before the given name. If you want to use the first name to send informal communications along the lines of "Jack, we have a wonderful new offer", then you're out of luck in China. They use the full name for those types of things.
Just like with the addresses, the only sensible thing to do is stop trying to fit everyone in the same box, in a manner of speaking. Because what you actually need is *one* box for a name. Your users are perfectly well aware of their own name, so they can enter it in whatever order or format they're used to. If you really insist on being the cool kid by sending messages with personalized greetings, then I suggest you ask the user "how should we address you?". And for goodness' sake, DO NOT try and validate the length of a name. 2 characters is perfectly common in Asian languages, whereas the longest official name is -- according to Guinness World Records -- 799 characters long.
KISS is the golden rule, as always. If you don't need need the "standard" granularity for names and addresses, then don't bother with it. It's a waste of everyone's time and it will only frustrate users who don't fit in any of your boxes.
