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.
What am I missing here? Any lossless compression algorithm works, even "string.reverse" would apply.
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.
Like transform "Mister" to "Mr"
Always ask the question you actually mean to ask.
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).
(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!)
Hill
John
Mass
Which was delivered to John Underhill, Andover, Mass. Unlikely to be true, but a great story.
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.