Jade, jon corrected me on this issue and i have discussed it with him in private emails - i agree that parties is the way to go.
Alfred, your points are well taken and you want good things. BUT, Jon is right - this should be a different package - one that does verification and spacial constructs, etc. I agree that the vast majority of openacs users are going to be operating from the US, Western Europe (or as Donald Rumsfeld beligerantly calls it "old europe"), and the probably other wealthy countries where internet use is widespread. I myself will need to store addresses primarily from the US and Canada, but we have a number of international students from all over - many of which are from these "random anomolies" like Cuba that you talk about (i.e. we have students from Etheopia, Uganda, Laos, etc.). I don't think my scenerio is going to be incredibly uncommon. So we need a place to store all addresses. Postal-address does this.
Alfred the things you want are GREAT, i want many of them myself, but this should be a different pacakge - one that relies on the storage postal-address provides but does its own thing. It would be great to have somebody write address validation procs for a number of countries - this would be fantastic, i hope you are able to do this, and if not i'll need to do some basic stuff (like making sure americans spell their state correctly and use valid zip codes - that are in fact located in the state they say it is). I encourage you to build a package called postal-address-validator or whatever you want to call it.
