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So you have a strong AI doing natural-language parsing to figure out from that freeform address whether you need to charge sales tax/VAT?

If you're doing business across state/province or national borders, getting that structured address data (and getting it right) can be awfully important.

Seems like the easiest solution would be for web developers to show the address in their country's format, if their customer is from their country, and to show a textarea box for anyone else.

Yeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.

It works very well for me. Provided the goal of the address field is to copy/paste it verbatim to an envelope - if you want to actually understand the different parts of the address this might be counterproductive.

A lot of people use fields such as state and zip code for demographic data collection. A free form textbox makes that more difficult.