An address document is a simple description of a single mailing address. Address element are meant more to be used as something to imbed in another document rather than as standalone documents themselves. Although different countries use widely differing formats for specifying addresses, most of the data for any country can be stuffed into two lines of generic address information, a city, a state, and a postal code. Four lines is enough to fill out an Fedex international airbill, and such a format is what is used here. If you need a more complete and granular address format, you may wish to look at something like the IDEAlliance Address Data Interchange Specification (http://www.idealliance.org/adis/). Every element in the address is optional for maximum flexibility. The elements to include for an address to make sense will vary by country. The most specific part of the address. This is usually the name of a person or department. The first generic address line. This line usually contains a street name and number. The second generic address line, providing data to augment address1. This line may contain information such as suite or building numbers. The name of the city or town. The name or abbreviation of the state or province. I call it only "state" for brevity, not as an insult to Canadians. A postal code, such as a US ZIP code. The name of the country. An optional ID attribute. An implementation of the address type as the element "address".