I have said this before, and I will say it again

[conuly]

Once, many years ago now, I filled in a form that called for my zip code first and then filled out the city and state based on that.

And ever since then I've actively resented having to find my state on a drop down menu, like, even more than I already did. Inevitably, if I try typing I go "NY" to find out that all states are done in full, or else I go "NE" to find out that they're all abbreviated.

Anyway, my point is obvious. If you have any pull at all, ever, encourage whoever makes these forms wherever they make them to populate the state and city from the zip code. It is vastly superior, and I hope that form maker got a bonus for that stroke of brilliance.

Comments

[redbird]

Some of the online forms I fill out autopopulate the state from the zip code, but only the state. This makes sense, because there are zip codes that overlap city or town borders, but none that include parts of more than one state borders. And some of those are state government websites, so most of the addresses they're recording will be in-state.

All I really want here is for the systems to treat the zip code as an arbitrary string, not a number. It's never going to make sense add, subtract, or multiply zip codes. And I know there are systems that are treating them as integers, because they take my input (say, 02474), strip the leading zero, and then reject the resulting address because the next piece of the program knows that zip codes have to be at least five digits.

[kengr]

A post on comp.risks many years back described a lovely bit of mis-programming based on an very wrong assumption.

The poster had looked up the "nearest store" at home and got an answer that wasn't all that near. On a whim, he tried it from work and got a much closer store.

After some investigation, it was discovered that the programmer for the app thought that *numerically* adjacent zip codes were *geographically* adjacent.

Not even close. When assigning a new zip code (usually because the area has grown) the area that gets the new code gets the next available zip code for the state. So 97201 could be next to 97299 or even 97999