4 ms·

I consider breaking the fields up well worth the trade-off of people without a surname having some difficulty with it, because that situation is extremely rare,

I consider breaking the fields up well worth the trade-off of people without a surname having some difficulty with it, because that situation is extremely rare, and the user experience is significantly worse if, e.g., I can't meaningfully sort names because I have no idea if you put your given name first or last, etc. There's also really nothing about JSON that should dictate that you can't handle the name "Null" or "O'Neill." You don't even need special escaping for those.

wbl 5y ago
There are entire counties with single names.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Which ones?
  - wbl 5y ago
    Myanmar and Afghanistan are the most well known.
jiggawatts 5y ago
Did you read the article? It is meaningless to "sort" names across countries. Most languages have their own sort rules, and some languages have multiple sorts depending on the specific usage! Sorting is almost never what you want. Are you printing out a phone book onto dead trees? No? Then you do not need to sort names. Just do substring search, and you've already got a UI that is 10x better than having people flip to 'A', then 'Aa' to get to 'Aaron', etc... If you're about to say "but I need to define a sort order for a database table key" then you've made another mistake and also not read the article...
- emodendroket 5y ago
  > Most languages have their own sort rules, and some languages have multiple sorts depending on the specific usage! That is true. However, it's also obviously true that a sort order that tries to take all of these into account, instead of using the rules of the current user's language, is obviously useless, so I don't understand why you think it's a meaningful objection. Users are surprised and annoyed by an inability to sort names.
- mcphage 5y ago
  I guess I'm not too worried about sort order being incorrect, since it already is incorrect 99% of the time anyway—most programs sort strings "1" < "12" < "2", whereas that's... wrong. It annoys me several times per week, but we've all accepted it and moved on. Apple's OSes do it right, but that's about it—and even still, if you're in a shell, it's probably back to being wrong.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Windows Explorer gets it (mostly) correct also.

wbl 5y ago

There are entire counties with single names.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Which ones?
- wbl 5y ago
  Myanmar and Afghanistan are the most well known.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Did you read the article? It is meaningless to "sort" names across countries. Most languages have their own sort rules, and some languages have multiple sorts depending on the specific usage! Sorting is almost never what you want. Are you printing out a phone book onto dead trees? No? Then you do not need to sort names. Just do substring search, and you've already got a UI that is 10x better than having people flip to 'A', then 'Aa' to get to 'Aaron', etc... If you're about to say "but I need to define a sort order for a database table key" then you've made another mistake and also not read the article...

emodendroket 5y ago
> Most languages have their own sort rules, and some languages have multiple sorts depending on the specific usage! That is true. However, it's also obviously true that a sort order that tries to take all of these into account, instead of using the rules of the current user's language, is obviously useless, so I don't understand why you think it's a meaningful objection. Users are surprised and annoyed by an inability to sort names.
mcphage 5y ago
I guess I'm not too worried about sort order being incorrect, since it already is incorrect 99% of the time anyway—most programs sort strings "1" < "12" < "2", whereas that's... wrong. It annoys me several times per week, but we've all accepted it and moved on. Apple's OSes do it right, but that's about it—and even still, if you're in a shell, it's probably back to being wrong.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Windows Explorer gets it (mostly) correct also.