Picture a customer in Dubai at your checkout. They fill in their address and hit a required field labelled "Postcode". The UAE doesn't use postcodes, and most mail goes to PO boxes. So they type "00000", or "N/A", or they close the tab.
Nobody decided to turn away customers from the UAE. Someone built a form around the addresses they knew, and made every field required because tidy forms do that.
Geocoding shows you just how differently countries and regions do things. An address looks like simple, structured data: a house number, a street, a town and a postcode. In practice, every one of those parts is missing, different or optional somewhere in the world. This chapter covers how addresses vary, how to design forms that accept them, and what happens when you turn them into points on a map.