

Personal names around the world - mxhold
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

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mxhold
"How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications
of those differences on the design of forms, databases, ontologies, etc. for
the Web?"

This has basically convinced me that you should only ever have a single (long)
"Name" text input.

See also: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

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greggman
Except as pointed out that's generally not sufficient for Japanese since given
their kanji based name you'll have no idea how to pronounce or sort it without
them also telling you in a separate field how it's pronounced.

There's also the issue of interacting with other systems. You may want just
one field but some credit card processor might want 2 etc....

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killertypo
This is always a difficult task to tackle, especially when dealing with data
sources like Active Directory that want a surname and given name, which may
not always be the case for everyone.

Admittedly the best answer is to get a "Family Name" and a "Nick Name" (not to
be confused with a user name). The big problem is convincing the management
they don't need to collect first name, last name, greeting...etc

~~~
mhink
I was thinking about this- maybe one could have a "formal name", "familiar
name", and "honorific" field?

I think the problem is drawing the distinction between the questions "what is
your canonical identity?" and "how should we address you?"

