So is there a best-practice reference data schema example that handles all the problems in this list? Is there a XML/JSON/RFC specification that handles all na

So is there a best-practice reference data schema example that handles all the problems in this list? Is there a XML/JSON/RFC specification that handles all names in the world and 100% of every edge-case? Clearly, a database table with only the fields first_name, middle_name, last_name is not enough. So what does a perfect reference data schema look like? Add to that the reference examples of GUI frontends for those data schemas. Imo, the above would be much more useful because one could copy&paste the best design as into MySql/SQLite/etc as concrete engineering instead wondering what to do about a long list of abstract bullets saying "you're doing it wrong". EDIT to reply: >A generic "Name" field that takes some sequence of Unicode characters. There is no major company that handles millions/billions of customer names that uses a single name string field. E.g. Not Netflix/Amazon/Google/Facebook and various government websites. You may also need the component parts of name (firstname, lastname) in APIs to verify credit cards. You can't reliably parse a single name field for its component parts because an American would put John Smith but an Chinese person could put Zedong Mao or Mao Zedong. But wait! You're still doing it wrong because "Zedong" in ASCII is an imperfect transliteration of the original Chinese characters which should use full Unicode. Ok I get you... but I still have a credit-card to process: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2004532/credit-card-validation-can-card-name-contain-non-ascii-characters/2005287 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2004532/credit-card-vali...