Does the USPS have guidelines or a list for valid city names? Does Target ship to the US only?
If the answer to either of those is "no" then their City validation code is almost assuredly broken.
If the answer to either of those is "no" then their City validation code is almost assuredly broken.
http://www.target.com/HelpContent?help=/sites/html/TargetOnl...
The USPS has an authoritative package of zip info including cities:
https://www.usps.com/business/address-information-systems.ht...
There is actually a pretty interesting response by a mail carrier as to what the minimal address requirements are for delivery by USPS:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110527152625AA...
But just the numbers, no words or anything. And it got there, but the post office clerk complained about it to the recipient :) (It was a small town.)
You could probably do that with a regular street address as well if you used zip+4. I.e. just the house number and the zip+4.
They even tried just for the US, and not international, and it still wasn't good enough. It just changes too much and any inconvenience to the customer was not acceptable.
If you put in a city on the list, then you get the green SUCCESS (and probably some autocomplete suggestions to take you there), if you put in one that's not on the list, you get an no cue at all (or an equivocal one)
Then as you make successful orders to previously unknown cities, you can add them to the known list (possibly as aliases of the "real" city name, which you can then display as a choice to future users on entry.
Populating the auto-complete list with the 100 biggest cities and accepting any input would probably give a better compromise.
Or why not just ask for zip code first and auto-populate the rest?
Q: How often do the ZIP / postal codes really change?
A: U.S. ZIP Codes change sporadically. Most of the time there's just a few changes, but every now and then (especially around July 1st) there will be major changes.
----
... In other words, they change all the bloody time.