Oh, believe me. As somebody with a name that includes accents, and a surname that contains two words, with relatives whose names include internal capitalisation

Oh, believe me. As somebody with a name that includes accents, and a surname that contains two words, with relatives whose names include internal capitalisation and apostrophes, I know _all_ about that. The thing is that canonicalisation is a kind of sanitisation. As you mentioned, I personally prefer it to be done in real time. Sometimes it can't, however, you have to resort to munging, which is on the nastier end of sanitisation. Here's a short story: AFNIC run the .fr registry, and they, unlike other registries, expect you to provide a contact's given name and surname separately. The joys of French bureaucracy. At my previous job (hosting provider and domain registrar), I built the company's domain management system. The systems in front of that didn't care about the form a person's name took so long as it was present, and most other domain registries are the same. There was no sensible way to get the applicant to enter them previously (this data was taken from the billing system). This necessitated that I build a library that could parse people's names, and I ended up developing a rather large number of heuristics for doing so as accurately as possible. It only covered the Latin alphabet, as that's all AFNIC would accept at the time, but it worked. The problem is that most don't put that kind of thought into data sanitisation, and do things such as those you mentioned. And that's why we can't have nice things.