151–160 of 527 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re talking about literally billions of people, not “occasional edge cases”.
How do you figure that? Billions of people would mean over 10% of the world population having exceptional names, which seems very implausible.
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…
This list would have been so much better with examples or a short explanation how or why the assumptions break in case it is not obvious. The author offers examples on demand [1] but while I would be interested to know them, it seems not important enough to bother the author. Maybe the author sees this comment and has some time to spare, then it could benefit everyone and not just one person asking. [1] If you need e…
It's just not that hard to find problems with name inputs.
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?
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…
Is there an article showing a solution because listing problems is the easy part? And maybe it's just me but >because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition. isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.
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?
See my other comment on Vietnamese names, actually if you have a Belgian passport and a Vietnamese name, your actual given name (the third part for women with the "Thi" middle name) is not shown on your passport or identity card, only the first letter of it.
For French people who have three given names it's the same, although the two last ones are generally not used (you could say they're little endian compared to Vietnamese big endian names, I suppose) so it's not as important.
I have no idea why, and Belgium is the only country I know that does that, but it means your passport name is absolutely not your canonical full name.
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 (…
"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…
It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first.
In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.
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 (…
There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
"This article doesn't provide all the answers – the best answer will vary according to the needs of the application, and in most cases, it may be difficult to find a 'perfect' solution."
Do you need their legal name? As in, actually legally need it?
Realise that you'll probably need several name fields in different places depending on what you're doing, i.e. an e-commerce app may have a name to address someone by, a name on a billing address, a name on a shipping address, a name on a payment method... all of which can vary for the same person.
If all you need is a way to address them, just a single name field.