5 ms·

I wish these things came with examples. I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go a

I wish these things came with examples. I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go about their life. Also, who registers to a website, but doesn't have a name? At some point you need to choose an identifier if you want to interact with other people or their services, and you might even need to conform your identifier to something that someone can comprehend and reproduce. And at that point most of these falsehoods disappears. Illegal characters? Yes, you can't write your name as じゃわØÆÅ?+ on your boarding pass. No, your name on your boarding pass won't match your name in your passport, because the name in your passport conforms to whatever writing system in use in the country of your passport and the boarding pass accepts only ASCII letters. And airports still runs 24/7.

justAnIdea 6y ago
Yep. This article is kinda pretentious to be honest. Most people writing software know these, they just ignore (or work around) some of them due to the complexity of implementing them (cost/benefit doesn't make sense here).
m_mueller 6y ago
That being said, I’d at least expect airlines from countries with latin alphabet to support extended latin charsets. Not doing so just complicates things. My name is Müller. This can be translated to basic latin as Mueller (which e.g. is my passport). No English speaker gets that, thus most systems just replace ü -> u, and create confusion in the process as then the name does not match the passport anymore. And that’s just German, probably the closest language to English. I can’t even imagine the troubles of Vietnamese people, whose language got romanized by a Frenchman, to spell their names so that American programmed systems don’t trip up. A little more flexibility in thinking about languages would do American tech companies good IMO.
dathinab 6y ago
> Illegal characters? Except that in some cultures names with illegal characters (depending on what you see as illegal) are on your passport. And some other cultures might not have passports. The simplest reason is that not all names can be mapped to unicode. Which for a lot of software don't matter as supporting non-unicode names is not worth it. But if you are a government or some system used by one, or some other institution where you can't just randomly turn down some people from being registered in your computer system this is a potential problem. Lastly there are systems which can contain fictive or historic names so じゃわØÆÅ?+ might very well be a name. The only sane way to handle names is to handle them as opaque blobs which you display and maybe do a (fuzzy) search on but not much more. Never _ever_ use names as any form of identificators in _any_ computer systems as they are both highly imprecise, unstable in time, unstable in context and unstable in interpretation. (E.g. the same glyph sequences might be the same name or not depending on some historic context specific to the person using the name including weather or not the name is used in a way where it is "imported" into a culture, how people might have moved between cultural context in their live time and the live time of their ancestors and other factors. This is so extremely specific to the person using the name that there is absolutely no way to handle this (besides asking the person in question)).
- bedatadriven 6y ago
  That's one of patio11 points, I don't quite get: in 2021, _are_ there names which can't be encoded as unicode?
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Yes but very few as far as I know. There are also names which have no written form. Also as far as I remember there are cases where there are multiple "forms" of the same character which theoretically should be purely cosmetic but over time the same name with some of it's characters in different forms has developed different "meanings" which for countries in which the "meaning" of a name matters is a relevant difference. But as they normally don't mean anything different they have the same code point in unicode and (had when I read about it) no modifier to denote the differences either. So while this names can somewhat be written they would have to be written in a form which can be seen as degraded by the person having the name and as such forcing them to do so might be seen as mean, impolite maybe even slightly insulting. Sadly I don't have a reference to the article anymore. Also I don't remember the languages this appeared in but I think it was related to mandarin but I'm not completely sure. Still the technical overhead of supporting non-unicode is massive and in general not worth it for nearly any application. Exceptions include historical use-cases cases and government use-cases. Also unicode strives to cover "all there is" so it might be "fixed" by now in some form or another.
  - pdw 6y ago
    I've heard that Unicode doesn't encode many rare Chinese/Japanese characters that only occur in personal names. In practice these people are forced to change their names. Here's an example: https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE6801RZ20100901 https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE...
  - anoncake 6y ago
    And if so, what can you do? Store a picture?
    - dathinab 6y ago
gfour 6y ago
> I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go about their life. (Christian Orthodox, majority) Greeks don't name babies when born, only when baptized (usually during the first year, but could be later). Until then, they appear on formal documents as either "male"/"female" or as "AKO" ("no first name"). In practice, people either call a baby "the baby" or may sometimes use the (future) name informally.
- bradknowles 6y ago
  The Catholic Church here in the US (at least, in San Antonio) will give you a second middle name at the time of your Confirmation. At least they did, back in the 60s. My wife has a second middle name that you don’t usually see, not even on most official documents. But it is a part of her full legal name.
dontchooseanick 6y ago
> I wish these things came with examples. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso : https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso See ? First name ? Last name ? 2 components ? Uppercase ? Having faulty but tolerant systems does not mean they are right
ben_w 6y ago
1/2/3/4: a friend of mine uses her maiden name professionally, her husband’s surname for things like bank accounts 5: Middle names are common but optional in the UK, I have one but my dad had two. 6: my full name, including middle name, is longer than the default space available in most paper forms which gives you separate box for each letter. String together any three 8-character first/middle/family names for same effect 7/8: In 2002, Richard James changed his name to “Mr Yellow-Rat Foxysquirrel Fairydiddle”, in exchange for a pint of beer. 9: Ἑλένη, نهاد وديع حداد, 蔡英文, ⴰⴳⵍⵍⵉⴷ ⵎⵓⵃⴰⵎⵎⴷ ⵙⴷⵉⵙ, … 10: Would الملك محمد السادس / ⴰⴳⵍⵍⵉⴷ ⵎⵓⵃⴰⵎⵎⴷ ⵙⴷⵉⵙ count? Or is this about mixing rather than having multiple variants for different character sets? 11/12/13: I don’t know how to even find examples 14: “-son” is a suffix? 15: “Number 16 Bus Shelter”, New Zealand: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/number-16-bus-shelter-violence-among-kids-registered-names/E7OGEDDDEGAWK2V5W4ODX22U24/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/number-16-bus-shelter-violence... 16/17: same problem searching as 12/13 18: I need help with this one too 19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Abraham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Abraham 20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person 21/22/23: Back in my first job, one guy called Mark Thompson had to collaborate with another guy in the same company also called Mark Thompson. Neither of these two was the Director General of the BBC, the author, the DJ, the newscaster, the reporter, the chemist, nor either the Arizona or Minnesota politicians. 24: China’s, what, 20% of world population now? Lots of rich Chinese people around, you probably do want to be able to support them. 25/26/27: likewise 28: probably has happened, given what people are like 29: Migration also happens (I am one) 30: I assume this is about going between character sets? In which case: is “Colin” transliterated as in the American (Colin Powell) or the British (Colin Firth)? Lossless has the same issue in the other direction, but it’s harder to give examples 31: Bad words for programming safety: https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/1365461618977476610 https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/136546161897747... https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ Rude surnames in English include: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicks_(surname) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicks_(surname) 32-36: I don’t know anything about this, beyond that it can happen surprisingly late 37: Chinese citizens living in America, with a Chinese state database entry with their actual name plus something in America that doesn’t support non-ASCII which has a crude attempt at a transliteration. 38: Depends what you mean by “well designed”. Starbucks’ coffee-writing is pretty infamous for the amusing errors, and that’s without even getting as far as bits. Then you have the extra problem of the difference between the ü character (U+00FC) and u+(combining diaeresis (U+0308)). 39: wherever you’re from, most people are from elsewhere. 40: same problem as 11/12/13
4ggr0 6y ago
European websites and services usually don't cause any issues for me. But lots of US websites and services don't like the "ë" in my name and tell me that it's an invalid character. Yeah, seems like I have an illegal character on my passport, thanks for telling me.
- laurent92 6y ago
  And autocomplete doesn’t work without accents: Ke... doesn’t suggest Kévin in @mention systems.

justAnIdea 6y ago

Yep. This article is kinda pretentious to be honest. Most people writing software know these, they just ignore (or work around) some of them due to the complexity of implementing them (cost/benefit doesn't make sense here).

m_mueller 6y ago

That being said, I’d at least expect airlines from countries with latin alphabet to support extended latin charsets. Not doing so just complicates things. My name is Müller. This can be translated to basic latin as Mueller (which e.g. is my passport). No English speaker gets that, thus most systems just replace ü -> u, and create confusion in the process as then the name does not match the passport anymore. And that’s just German, probably the closest language to English. I can’t even imagine the troubles of Vietnamese people, whose language got romanized by a Frenchman, to spell their names so that American programmed systems don’t trip up. A little more flexibility in thinking about languages would do American tech companies good IMO.

dathinab 6y ago

> Illegal characters? Except that in some cultures names with illegal characters (depending on what you see as illegal) are on your passport. And some other cultures might not have passports. The simplest reason is that not all names can be mapped to unicode. Which for a lot of software don't matter as supporting non-unicode names is not worth it. But if you are a government or some system used by one, or some other institution where you can't just randomly turn down some people from being registered in your computer system this is a potential problem. Lastly there are systems which can contain fictive or historic names so じゃわØÆÅ?+ might very well be a name. The only sane way to handle names is to handle them as opaque blobs which you display and maybe do a (fuzzy) search on but not much more. Never _ever_ use names as any form of identificators in _any_ computer systems as they are both highly imprecise, unstable in time, unstable in context and unstable in interpretation. (E.g. the same glyph sequences might be the same name or not depending on some historic context specific to the person using the name including weather or not the name is used in a way where it is "imported" into a culture, how people might have moved between cultural context in their live time and the live time of their ancestors and other factors. This is so extremely specific to the person using the name that there is absolutely no way to handle this (besides asking the person in question)).

bedatadriven 6y ago
That's one of patio11 points, I don't quite get: in 2021, _are_ there names which can't be encoded as unicode?
- dathinab 6y ago
  Yes but very few as far as I know. There are also names which have no written form. Also as far as I remember there are cases where there are multiple "forms" of the same character which theoretically should be purely cosmetic but over time the same name with some of it's characters in different forms has developed different "meanings" which for countries in which the "meaning" of a name matters is a relevant difference. But as they normally don't mean anything different they have the same code point in unicode and (had when I read about it) no modifier to denote the differences either. So while this names can somewhat be written they would have to be written in a form which can be seen as degraded by the person having the name and as such forcing them to do so might be seen as mean, impolite maybe even slightly insulting. Sadly I don't have a reference to the article anymore. Also I don't remember the languages this appeared in but I think it was related to mandarin but I'm not completely sure. Still the technical overhead of supporting non-unicode is massive and in general not worth it for nearly any application. Exceptions include historical use-cases cases and government use-cases. Also unicode strives to cover "all there is" so it might be "fixed" by now in some form or another.
- pdw 6y ago
  I've heard that Unicode doesn't encode many rare Chinese/Japanese characters that only occur in personal names. In practice these people are forced to change their names. Here's an example: https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE6801RZ20100901 https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE...
- anoncake 6y ago
  And if so, what can you do? Store a picture?
  - dathinab 6y ago

gfour 6y ago

> I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go about their life. (Christian Orthodox, majority) Greeks don't name babies when born, only when baptized (usually during the first year, but could be later). Until then, they appear on formal documents as either "male"/"female" or as "AKO" ("no first name"). In practice, people either call a baby "the baby" or may sometimes use the (future) name informally.

bradknowles 6y ago
The Catholic Church here in the US (at least, in San Antonio) will give you a second middle name at the time of your Confirmation. At least they did, back in the 60s. My wife has a second middle name that you don’t usually see, not even on most official documents. But it is a part of her full legal name.

dontchooseanick 6y ago

> I wish these things came with examples. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso : https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso See ? First name ? Last name ? 2 components ? Uppercase ? Having faulty but tolerant systems does not mean they are right

ben_w 6y ago

1/2/3/4: a friend of mine uses her maiden name professionally, her husband’s surname for things like bank accounts 5: Middle names are common but optional in the UK, I have one but my dad had two. 6: my full name, including middle name, is longer than the default space available in most paper forms which gives you separate box for each letter. String together any three 8-character first/middle/family names for same effect 7/8: In 2002, Richard James changed his name to “Mr Yellow-Rat Foxysquirrel Fairydiddle”, in exchange for a pint of beer. 9: Ἑλένη, نهاد وديع حداد, 蔡英文, ⴰⴳⵍⵍⵉⴷ ⵎⵓⵃⴰⵎⵎⴷ ⵙⴷⵉⵙ, … 10: Would الملك محمد السادس / ⴰⴳⵍⵍⵉⴷ ⵎⵓⵃⴰⵎⵎⴷ ⵙⴷⵉⵙ count? Or is this about mixing rather than having multiple variants for different character sets? 11/12/13: I don’t know how to even find examples 14: “-son” is a suffix? 15: “Number 16 Bus Shelter”, New Zealand: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/number-16-bus-shelter-violence-among-kids-registered-names/E7OGEDDDEGAWK2V5W4ODX22U24/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/number-16-bus-shelter-violence... 16/17: same problem searching as 12/13 18: I need help with this one too 19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Abraham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Abraham 20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person 21/22/23: Back in my first job, one guy called Mark Thompson had to collaborate with another guy in the same company also called Mark Thompson. Neither of these two was the Director General of the BBC, the author, the DJ, the newscaster, the reporter, the chemist, nor either the Arizona or Minnesota politicians. 24: China’s, what, 20% of world population now? Lots of rich Chinese people around, you probably do want to be able to support them. 25/26/27: likewise 28: probably has happened, given what people are like 29: Migration also happens (I am one) 30: I assume this is about going between character sets? In which case: is “Colin” transliterated as in the American (Colin Powell) or the British (Colin Firth)? Lossless has the same issue in the other direction, but it’s harder to give examples 31: Bad words for programming safety: https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/1365461618977476610 https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/136546161897747... https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ Rude surnames in English include: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicks_(surname) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicks_(surname) 32-36: I don’t know anything about this, beyond that it can happen surprisingly late 37: Chinese citizens living in America, with a Chinese state database entry with their actual name plus something in America that doesn’t support non-ASCII which has a crude attempt at a transliteration. 38: Depends what you mean by “well designed”. Starbucks’ coffee-writing is pretty infamous for the amusing errors, and that’s without even getting as far as bits. Then you have the extra problem of the difference between the ü character (U+00FC) and u+(combining diaeresis (U+0308)). 39: wherever you’re from, most people are from elsewhere. 40: same problem as 11/12/13

4ggr0 6y ago

European websites and services usually don't cause any issues for me. But lots of US websites and services don't like the "ë" in my name and tell me that it's an invalid character. Yeah, seems like I have an illegal character on my passport, thanks for telling me.

laurent92 6y ago
And autocomplete doesn’t work without accents: Ke... doesn’t suggest Kévin in @mention systems.