Textarea, You Are A Sunken Nothing

It should be possible to write an edit-server for other editors that work with Edit with Emacs, if you are that way inclined...

I was referring just to the street address part, though, which is almost always entirely freeform, or at least is up to complex and opaque rules that vary by city. This is what textareas are for: unstructured input of a string (not prose writing, but simply a string) that may require newlines in it.

Coming right after the street address field would, of course, be separate single-line input fields for the city, country, etc... but the street address itself should allow as many lines as you need.

House Name, Road, Village, Town, County, Country (if applicable) Post Code.

My address structure is:

Flat Number - Building, Road, City, Country, Post Code

Some multi-input address forms require that I enter both a city and a county, which in the case of Londoners means you end up putting London twice. The only important parts of the address (for most uses, including credit card processing) are recipient name, house/flat name/number (actually, not sure about this - it might not be necessary) and Post Code.

So why not just have explicit inputs for those fields which are always required, and allow a more fuzzy input for everything else in the form of a textarea? It also means you're more likely to be able to deal with addresses in countries that use slightly different systems.