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Except you are assuming you can reliably make decisions about how a person's name should be used based on your classification scheme for names. First, your clas

Except you are assuming you can reliably make decisions about how a person's name should be used based on your classification scheme for names. First, your classification scheme will not cover all users (see the famous https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...). Second, your use cases will not match all users. You may consider "Hello Firstname" to be an appropriate informal greeting and "Hello Mr. Lastname" to be an appropriate formal greeting, but even for people having a first name and a last name, this is not universally true. The only person qualified to say how a name can appropriately be used is the owner of that name. If you need a greeting, ask the user how they would prefer to be addressed. If you need to show their name to others, ask how they would prefer their name to be displayed. If you need their name as understood by some government agency, ask for their name according to that government agency (note: this is not necessarily the same for all agencies; people do not necessarily have one single legal name). If you don't want to overwhelm the user, you can have a "Display name" or "Legal name" field depending on what is relevant to your application and use that as the default. But you should provide overrides for every case where you are using their name in a different context. If this sounds complicated, it is because names are complicated. I have seen too many people with names that don't fit the typical pattern of Firstname Lastname (composed solely of ASCII letters) get frustrated with systems that do not support them. I will not ever assume I can know how to manipulate or use someone's name without them needing to tell me. Nor will I assume their name must fit within some predefined character set or length.

wongarsu 7y ago
While you make good point I think I actually do pretty well on the falshoods with the scheme laid out in the grandparent comment. The cases I violate are: - I assume everyone has at least one name (not strictly true, but close enough to true for people using the internet) - I assume every name can be mapped to unicode (I don't even know how I would fix that assumption) - I assume all names fit in some fixed length (I give more space than the British passport and more than I can display in most situations) - Even though I don't assume that people have a first name or that people have a last name I assume everyone has at least one of the two I find all of these assumptions reasonable, and your scheme of "Display Name" and "Legal Name" shares most of these assumptions, or would share them in any reasonable implementation (You can't allow names that use gigabytes of space, so there will be some length limit, and most implementations will use unicode). Of course using a name after decomposing it isn't easy. I will concede that asking the user is easier and more reliable, but it does come with drawbacks as well.
- elefantastisch 7y ago
  I was mostly thinking about "Hello Firstname" and "Mr. Lastname". I know several people who, due to the commonness of their first name, go by their last name. For these people "Hello Lastname" is the correct informal greeting. I know others that go by their initials, and "Hello INITIALS" is the correct informal greeting. For these people, addressing them by their first name actually sounds more formal, and maybe even a little insensitive as it's against their preference. There is just no way for a system to know this without asking. But yeah, within the universe of ways to handle names, your schema comes pretty close to the ideal. I just think it's worth considering the ways it can still fail. "People consider their first names an appropriate informal greeting" is an assumption that definitely fails in some cases. Another place I've seen systems get this wrong is generating default avatars using first letter of first and last name as initials. For someone who goes by the initials of their first and middle names, this produces confusing initials. If someone goes by the name H. G. Wells, showing them as "Herbert" or "HW" is confusing. "HG" would be better. It fits the space for 2 letters and is more likely to be recognized as them. Per Wikipedia, the man most recognized by the name Liberace was known as "Lee" to his friends, "Walter" to his family, but had the first name "Władziu". Referring to the person by first name or by initials is likely to cause confusion. Again, there's just no way to know. Not trying to tear down your schema here, just provide some context for readers of the thread in general about the additional complexities that can still arise. Thanks for the interesting discussion.

wongarsu 7y ago

While you make good point I think I actually do pretty well on the falshoods with the scheme laid out in the grandparent comment. The cases I violate are: - I assume everyone has at least one name (not strictly true, but close enough to true for people using the internet) - I assume every name can be mapped to unicode (I don't even know how I would fix that assumption) - I assume all names fit in some fixed length (I give more space than the British passport and more than I can display in most situations) - Even though I don't assume that people have a first name or that people have a last name I assume everyone has at least one of the two I find all of these assumptions reasonable, and your scheme of "Display Name" and "Legal Name" shares most of these assumptions, or would share them in any reasonable implementation (You can't allow names that use gigabytes of space, so there will be some length limit, and most implementations will use unicode). Of course using a name after decomposing it isn't easy. I will concede that asking the user is easier and more reliable, but it does come with drawbacks as well.

elefantastisch 7y ago
I was mostly thinking about "Hello Firstname" and "Mr. Lastname". I know several people who, due to the commonness of their first name, go by their last name. For these people "Hello Lastname" is the correct informal greeting. I know others that go by their initials, and "Hello INITIALS" is the correct informal greeting. For these people, addressing them by their first name actually sounds more formal, and maybe even a little insensitive as it's against their preference. There is just no way for a system to know this without asking. But yeah, within the universe of ways to handle names, your schema comes pretty close to the ideal. I just think it's worth considering the ways it can still fail. "People consider their first names an appropriate informal greeting" is an assumption that definitely fails in some cases. Another place I've seen systems get this wrong is generating default avatars using first letter of first and last name as initials. For someone who goes by the initials of their first and middle names, this produces confusing initials. If someone goes by the name H. G. Wells, showing them as "Herbert" or "HW" is confusing. "HG" would be better. It fits the space for 2 letters and is more likely to be recognized as them. Per Wikipedia, the man most recognized by the name Liberace was known as "Lee" to his friends, "Walter" to his family, but had the first name "Władziu". Referring to the person by first name or by initials is likely to cause confusion. Again, there's just no way to know. Not trying to tear down your schema here, just provide some context for readers of the thread in general about the additional complexities that can still arise. Thanks for the interesting discussion.