31–40 of 115 posts
> In some countries (notably French speaking) it is convention to write a person’s surname in all caps to make it clear which part of the name is the surname. This is a French-specific thing? I didn't know that. I really like it, it makes it easier to know which part is the name and which part is the family name.
Gotcha. Un-validated unicode text boxes for names in forms from now on. After all, someone could be named like the contents of a 64MB binary blob. Compromises are unavoidable in web development.
Programmers need to learn from bureaucrats of the 19th century. When bookkeeping of the people truly became a thing in the 1800s, industrialised nations sent out bureaucrats to collect the names of people in villages. Unfortunately, people seldom had enough names to fill in the forms the bureaucrats had. The idea of a family name was not something bestowed to nor necessary for a lowborn. If you're the only Jack in to…
See eg this from the New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...
(The mandated adoption of surnames is a pretty complex topic and of course proceeded in different ways in various times and places.)
Huh? That's a bit like saying the name "John Doe" is "perhaps best known from being the name of a character in a movie." It's just the stand-in, "generic" Japanese name that's used in examples. If an alien had the name in a cartoon it was probably a joke about the alien going out if its way to appear ordinary, the way the characters in Third Rock from the Sun were named Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Anyway, this article always kind of rubbed me the wrong way. OK, maybe someone's name is one character that's not possible to represent with Unicode. What do you want me to do about it?
Programmers need to learn from bureaucrats of the 19th century. When bookkeeping of the people truly became a thing in the 1800s, industrialised nations sent out bureaucrats to collect the names of people in villages. Unfortunately, people seldom had enough names to fill in the forms the bureaucrats had. The idea of a family name was not something bestowed to nor necessary for a lowborn. If you're the only Jack in to…
Programmers need to learn from bureaucrats of the 19th century. When bookkeeping of the people truly became a thing in the 1800s, industrialised nations sent out bureaucrats to collect the names of people in villages. Unfortunately, people seldom had enough names to fill in the forms the bureaucrats had. The idea of a family name was not something bestowed to nor necessary for a lowborn. If you're the only Jack in to…
In some countries, women have different last names than men do. Eg. in macedonia, traditionally a person would get their fathers name as their surname (so if the fathers name was "Petar", and the son was Dragan, the lastname would be roughly translated to "Dragan of Peter"). Because there are different forms for feminine and masculine words, The son would be named "Dragan Petrovski", and the daughter (Eg Marija) woul…
We had a German friend who married a Spanish man, and she insisted on changing her surname to his when they got married since that was traditional for her. But for Spanish people this was really weird, since it sounded like they were siblings. I actually haven't asked them since they had kids, but I guess their kids must have his first surname doubled (which is not unusual - María Sanchez Sanchez just means that the first surname of both parents was Sanchez).