Formatting Locations
Jennie Goodwin wrote:
>First question. Most people use the standard location
>structure, I assume: city, county, state, country.
>
>Wht do you suggest for places, like hospitals,
>churches, cemeteries? Before the city or after the
>country?
A common question, asked often, answered in *many* different ways.
For myself, I've decided on putting the special place in parentheses
after
the City, which is pretty much the same as using a hyphen. Examples
this
would be:
McMinnville (Evergreen Memorial Park), Yamhill County, Oregon,
United States
Portland (St. Vincents Hospital), Multnomah County, Oregon, United
States
My reasoning for using Locations with Special Places in parentheses
after
the City:
1. I don't use events for locations. In a database sense, repeatedly
storing something that gets repeated many times over (an event) is bad.
For
example, if you use events to specify cemeteries and want to add some
information about a particular cemetery, where are you going to put
that
information? You need to add it to the event for each person who uses
that
cemetery.
2. I don't use the solution that separates a Special Place with a comma
because the vast majority of my Locations do not have a Special Place
with
them; that would require me to include an extra comma in the majority
of cases.
3. I don't use the solution that places the special place after the
Country
because the special place is almost certainly most closely related to
the
City and not the County, State, or Country.
4. I use parentheses because they provide both an opening and closing
symbol around the Special Place where the hyphen only provides an
opening
symbol. I believe others may make the opposite choice because the
hyphen is
less intrusive.
Dennis Nichols