Internationalizing a web page ... What is your experience?

We are taking our web application into different locales around the world and I am wondering what are peoples experiences with doing this. We built the database and the pages to allow for internationalization so we are already using UTF-8 encoding and all displayed text is resolved dynamically depending on desired language. What I am puzzled with is how to handle things that are drastically different between nations (cultures). These things include

Addresses, names, telephone numbers etc.

An example is a name. When we developed the system we created First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name columns. Well if you are dealing with some cultures they may not seperate the names like this or they may reverse the order and always say the surname first then the first name so a web form that displays

First Name ----
Middle Name ----
Last Name ----

might be confusing to a person that in their culture always addresses a person by the last name first and first name last. This may be a contrived example but since I have not travelled all over the world I don't have a lot of real examples.

I do know that addresses are very different. Especially like in rural India and I am assuming the Middle East.

Addresses are a pain because we use them, format them for all sorts of things inclusing mailings and credit card charges. Right now our database has Street1, Street2, Street3 etc and it works great for most nations but what about when we add a country that does not follow that convention?

So all you developers what have you all done? Do you simply have a catch all field and just allow free form text or do you have targeted forms that change based on the locale/language?

I am curious to here other peoples experiences.

thanks!

Doug

see this for formats:
bitboost.com and /ref/international-address-formats.html

so they are mostly the same type of thing but if you are trying exactness i figure you're in for a lot of pain - china has lots of places with no real formal address, japan is missing street names (all/sometimes)

i say go with free form - what is the purpose of the address anyway? if it is to fill in on somebody's USA-centric web form you're in trouble (in HK we don't even have postcodes) but if it to print on an invoice, shouldn't the address be an acceptable format when received? how can you verify it anyway?

a discussion is here:
codinghorror.com and /blog/archives/000532.html

good luck.

Right now, you're at the l10n/localisation aspect of form filling. There's really no way of being able to rationalise all street addresses in a generic way such that you provide a nice localised page. So for addresses that you don't have a template for, just store it as a big blob of text.