Re: Civic Address for V2

Hi Charles,

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com> wrote:
>
> So this comes back to the use cases and requirements. If being able to
> compare addresses and make useful inferences matters, then it is important
> to split out the semantics, with the level of detail determining how far
> down the semantic split should go. Otherwise, you are right that it is not
> really important.
>

I think you're absolutely right, this is the issue. We could go down
the route of splitting semantics in such a way that the address format
has a field dedicated to every particularity of any address on Earth
and satisfy all use cases from here to eternity. Or we could have a
slightly more pragmatic approach of drawing the line at a level of
detail that we deem reasonable in terms of complexity (i.e. easy to
understand by developers and capable of satisfying the use cases we
now have in the document). If we're careful to design the API in an
extensible manner, we can act on feedback from application developers
and API implementers and extend the format based on their needs. To
me, this latter approach is the one that we should take: start from
from rfc 4119 and simplify it  (i.e. coalesce some fields and give
them humanly understandable names) as I proposed. This yields a
solution that is also reasonably close to what Microsoft has in
products that ship pretty much everywhere, which is rather reassuring
to me.

Thanks,
Andrei

Received on Friday, 6 March 2009 13:50:37 UTC