Even aside from the politicized content, I found it jarring that this bounced between clear and 'demonstrable' statements and entries like "you do not need a postal address", which was just a Twitter link to some letter delivered without one. It's not how I'd prefer to see this stuff curated, either.
> There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
What am I missing here? Any lossless compression algorithm works, even "string.reverse" would apply.
I think the implication is that a transformation won't be reversible if you don't know exactly what was applied?
Like, I've had the situation of seeing a poorly-marked name string and going "I think that's 'Last, First' formatting, but I'm really not certain..." Or if you do any formatting change you'll get bizarre problems like apostrophes becoming directional quotes.
But yes, the rule-as-written isn't right, and I'm not sure what was meant.
I think what is meant is, if you combine a first name and a last name, you can't break the full name back into first and last name. Because people have names with spaces in them, among other problems.
I'm not sure I understand either. Any one-to-one function where the name falls under the inverse image of the range works (notably, stupid things like the identity mapping along with, you know, binary representations, etc).
What if the name has spaces in it? How do you differentiate reliably between a middle name and a name with spaces? It gets even worst when there may have been previous transforms, like forcing family name to be the last name.
Frequently someone's /name/ is part of a mailing ADDRESS. You can, and maybe should, limit this to a individual lines. However the only way to be SURE is to give an actual freeform multi-line input box, like a textarea.
If you want a string to greet someone as, ask for that, and store it separately.
If you want a title to display within a directory listing, accept that.
Generally, do not decompose things for your users, EXCEPT possibly client side while populating form elements for their convenience (and verification/correction).
Postal addressing is actually a very interesting topic; that statement is demonstrable. Many smaller towns internationally do not require an address line; all letters to the city are delivered to a central hub and distributed based on name/other information.
My complaint was with the wording and generalization. "Not everyone has/needs a postal address" is true, "you do not need a postal address" is not - living in a big city, I don't get mail that's even slightly mislabeled. And yes, that's a nitpick, but I was mostly objecting to a sweeping statement with a Twitter link that doesn't clarify much.
(As for the specific question, postal addressing is fascinating. Someone in my family has an unusable address with an alphanumeric house number, and Amazon won't ship to it. And in the last one of these threads, someone mentioned living in a country which uses standardized directions-from-landmark as a formal address!)
There's an apocryphal story of someone writing a letter and placing it in an envelope with a picture of Alfred E. Neuman on it and mailing it (with appropriate postage). It was delivered to Mad Magazine, the intended recipient.
>Many smaller towns internationally do not require an address line
Citation needed. I've sent mail all over the world, and the only place I've seen where you can get away with that is Ireland. It's actually famous for this. Unless you're talking about some really backwater developing nations, every nation I've sent mail to does require an address line of some kind. However, in the UK, there are a lot of funny-looking addresses in the more rural areas. They have an address line, but it's really just the name of some hamlet or house or something, then they give the name of some farther-away but larger town, and finally the name of some main town/city where the mail is first routed. But they also have a detailed postal code that can route things by itself. Out of reasonably-developed nations, Ireland is the one that really stands out for having an antiquated postal system, but it does seem to work fine for them. It's also different and more modern for addresses within Dublin, where they do have a (very short) postal code.
The only other place where I've seen a place where you don't need a street or house number is for addresses at Kibbutzes in Israel.
Even aside from the politicized content, I found it jarring that this bounced between clear and 'demonstrable' statements and entries like "you do not need a postal address", which was just a Twitter link to some letter delivered without one. It's not how I'd prefer to see this stuff curated, either.