Best Design/Order/Layout For Mailing Address Form

Is there any standards out there when it comes to a mailing address form? I need to collect the following fields:

• address line 1


• address line 2


• city



• postal code (or zip)


• province(or state)


• country

The country and province will be drop downs. (the province one being dependant on the country)

so my question is: is it better to have the fields in a similar layout to a standard mailing form: ie:

address line 1    
address line 2    
city   province   postal code
country

or in a more logical order like:

address line 1    
address line 2    
city   postal code    
country province

Answer

Luke Wroblewski wrote an article at UX Matters about international address forms. I'd recommend consulting that article as it lists some best practices, patterns and conventions distilled from user research. Luke also wrote a book about web forms called Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks which covers this topic as well.

Near the end of his article, he also highlights Amazon's form, which is generic and supports all kinds of inputs. Amazon would be a good place to do some research for your form design.