20 years of online shopping and a whole industry excited to collect data and autofill and address checking functions STILL mess up apartments.

The system is set up to work well with houses, but there is no consensus on if "apartment/suite" should be a separate field or not... and it's also still often rendered wrong, and makes bad suggestions such as "correcting"

123ABC to 123Abc

Granted when I worked in database design this was my "thing" so I'm hypercritical ... but still.

I get personally offended because I suspect that it's some kind of American suburban-centric mentality that makes apartments an afterthought.

The correct answer is that "apartment suite" should be a separate field NOT tacked on to the street address, but in most renderings it should be on the same line with a comma.

And you need to deftly separate this information if the user tries to enter it in the address line.

ANYWAY.

Every now and then I STILL encounter a system that just can't handle the existence of apartments. There is no way to enter the information because they use an address checker that strips it away... but don't have their own field to store the data.

@futurebird I mean, how many people in New York live in multi-unit dwellings, like a hundred?

@funkula

Yeah that's very typical. There are like 100 units in our building but next door it's about 300.

I get personally offended because I suspect that it's some kind of American suburban-centric mentality that makes apartments an afterthought.

The correct answer is that "apartment suite" should be a separate field NOT tacked on to the street address, but in most renderings it should be on the same line with a comma.

And you need to deftly separate this information if the user tries to enter it in the address line.

ANYWAY.

20 years of online shopping and a whole industry excited to collect data and autofill and address checking functions STILL mess up apartments.

The system is set up to work well with houses, but there is no consensus on if "apartment/suite" should be a separate field or not... and it's also still often rendered wrong, and makes bad suggestions such as "correcting"

123ABC to 123Abc

Granted when I worked in database design this was my "thing" so I'm hypercritical ... but still.

@futurebird the funny thing is if you live in an area where the zip code starts with a zero and the database stores it as an integer

I don't know if this is a problem in the US but it was a very common problem here in some parts of Germany. It got better over the years but some web shops still have this problem.

To understand your apartment problem: I assume you don't just have your name on the door bell but an apartment number like "Apt. 123AB"?

20 years of online shopping and a whole industry excited to collect data and autofill and address checking functions STILL mess up apartments.

The system is set up to work well with houses, but there is no consensus on if "apartment/suite" should be a separate field or not... and it's also still often rendered wrong, and makes bad suggestions such as "correcting"

123ABC to 123Abc

Granted when I worked in database design this was my "thing" so I'm hypercritical ... but still.

@futurebird There is so much like this — software issues that are technically fixable but nobody is interested.

One of my favorites is calendar invites. They don’t work because calendars don’t have a unique identifier standard.

Or CR/LF paragraph boundary problems persisting for over 30y.

I guess they all wait for AGI now.

@jgordon

Calendars don't have standardization because Google, Microsoft, Apple and others are trying to lock people in to their system by NOT making it easy to share such information. So you end up saying "we use google calendar" and doing sales work for them.

This practice should attract more shame and derision than it does. It is very ugly and makes everyone's life worse.

Why can't I add a google calendar event to an apple calendar? It's not because it is "too hard"

@jgordon

Calendars don't have standardization because Google, Microsoft, Apple and others are trying to lock people in to their system by NOT making it easy to share such information. So you end up saying "we use google calendar" and doing sales work for them.

This practice should attract more shame and derision than it does. It is very ugly and makes everyone's life worse.

Why can't I add a google calendar event to an apple calendar? It's not because it is "too hard"

@futurebird @jgordon yeah, but aren't .ics at least standard files? I'm only bringing this up because I guess it still allows for migrating your data to other calendars, I think ... something I have a hard time doing with notes apps. I don't think there's a standardised file for those

Every now and then I STILL encounter a system that just can't handle the existence of apartments. There is no way to enter the information because they use an address checker that strips it away... but don't have their own field to store the data.

@futurebird But clearly only "the poors" live in apartments/condos, and who cares about them.

Stares at all the luxury condos taking over my city that *start at $1MM*

@jgordon

Calendars don't have standardization because Google, Microsoft, Apple and others are trying to lock people in to their system by NOT making it easy to share such information. So you end up saying "we use google calendar" and doing sales work for them.

This practice should attract more shame and derision than it does. It is very ugly and makes everyone's life worse.

Why can't I add a google calendar event to an apple calendar? It's not because it is "too hard"

@futurebird @jgordon In Fantastical I can move events from one calendar platform to another. I'm not sure what happens if it is an event that I was invited to.

I think the bigger problem is that when invited to an event via Google Calendar it is always easier to accept the invitation, assuming that you are using a Gmail account, than if you use a different calendar/email system.

@futurebird What it comes down to: if you want to deliver to anyone except your friends, especially if you're shipping internationally, the only thing that works within the country level is a freeform multi-line text field.

@RogerBW @futurebird

And yet that may just replace machine-encoded biases with human-habit biases:

sport of sacred spherical cows (@beadsland@hcommons.social)

@dymaxion@infosec.exchange @KatS@chaosfem.tw @futurebird@sauropods.win Once had something shipped to me from Germany that got caught in a USPS mail loop because the shipper was confused by my unit number, and used it for the building number on the routing label, insisting all the while that they had reproduced my address exactly as given to them.

hcommons.social (hcommons.social)

To be clear, in Usia, building numbers appear at the beginning of the line, where unit numbers appear at the end. In Germany, building number appears at the end of the line.

So now you, as a German shipper, prepare a routing label for a Usian address that ends with a unit number. You're given a freeform multi-line text field, but the courier wants specific fields. What ends up in the building number field depends on how cognizant you are of the difference between German and Usian addressing practices.