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Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

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Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#311

Post by sinuhe69 »

nicbou wrote: post #81
muzani wrote: post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

This is what I usually do if I need the name at all, but sometimes you need to interface with systems that need that data split. A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal.…

As a general case, you can ask for the full name in the printed order as the user wishes and ask for a preferred calling name, in this case "Frau Dr. Musterfrau", then problems solved!

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#312

Post by ttepasse »

alkonaut wrote: post #98

So first of all everyone has read "falsehoods programmers believe about names". And of course everyone knows we should just use "name" and that's it. Perhaps a greeting/displayname if we need to do "Hello $customer" in an email. But still. There are often hard requirements that are impossible to reconcile with the "just store one name" idea. As an example: you need to produce alphabetically sorted lists. It would rar…

Even sorting alphabetically sorted lists by last name differ in western cultures, in the case of particles in the last names.

Some countries file “de Rohan”, “von Ruhr”, “van Rotterdam” and similar under “R”, others just under the first character of the string.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#313

Post by gvx »

cybervegan wrote: post #180

I was wondering when someone would cite this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... But since nobody else seems to have done so, I will. Globally, names don't follow any common format or concept at all that you can reduce to a formula. My takeaway is that it's best to have a free-format "full name" field, and another "preferred name" field so you can allow people to choose how to be referred…

Honestly, most apps don't need a full name. Just a preferred name is enough.

If you really need a full name, it'll be because you need it for a specific institution, like government or bank. In that case, you probably need the ability to provide a separate full name for each institution.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#315

Post by morkalork »

usrusr wrote: post #276
weinzierl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same." This is the way to go. "The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here." It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal s…

Germany used to be extremely restrictive about the set of character sequences that were allowed as given names. Some of that is probably still in place. When everybody was called Fritz or Hans or Gundula plus some word describing an ancestor's profession (it's all following the pattern of Smith and Miller), the order didn't really matter and that freedom was liberally abused: contexts that use the formal as identifie…

>sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her

That has a very "part of the crew, part of the ship" feeling to it. Work the land, become the land, you're named for the land that you work! With marital status, who your father was, your family's occupation, and where you're working, all in a name, résumés needn't be a thing.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#316

Post by rsynnott »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #108
wmeddie wrote: post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

Very interesting however >People have exactly one canonical full name. What is on your passport then?

What's on your passport may not be canonical. In some countries (Ireland and the UK, for instance) your name is, for practical (and generally legal!) purposes, whatever you use day to day; it wouldn't be _that_ uncommon for someone to have name X on their passport but have been going by name Y for years, and in this case name Y would probably be considered their legal name in most contexts.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#317

Post by david-gpu »

muzani wrote: post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

Like many folks in Latin America, I have two given names and two surnames (no hyphen). I run into IT systems that choke at my two surnames every now and then and it's a pain.

Introducing a hyphen isn't great: it doesn't match my legal name and it's awkward because some people do have a hyphenated surname plus another surname.

I've also met several people whose legal name doesn't include a surname.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#319

Post by pmontra »

saalweachter wrote: post #267
Eavolution wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I as an example have 2 passports, and my name is first middle1 middle2 last. One of my passports has my name like that, the other is first middle1 last, so even between passports its not the same, as one of them drops one of my middle names.

I know people hate the idea of all three of world government, government IDs, and reducing people to numbers, but things would be a lot easier if we could just write on forms "I'm person number 15389247652" and let name matching be relegated to historical documents.

As you hinted, we would need a global authority recognized and trusted by everyone at least for name registration and resolution.

About government IDs and reducing people to numbers, most of the threads here are already giving them for granted. We are a number once we're in a database.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#320

Post by paulmooreparks »

midoridensha wrote: post #162
naniwaduni wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do this: what language do you think a name like 金正恩 belongs to, and how do you rule out the others? Given this, what parts do you expect to extract from it?

It's very simple: put a drop-down field on the web form which allows the user to select which naming convention they'd like to use (generally by country, but there can be more for other regions too). This should yield only a few hundred different options to scroll through. Then each option loads a different form specific to that option. Load the whole thing in one giant blob of JS and have it load for every page view…

Upvoted for the delightful use of sarcasm.
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