4 ms·

You can treat names as byte blobs for as long as you don't use them for their purpose -- naming people. Suppose you have a unicode blob of my name in your data

You can treat names as byte blobs for as long as you don't use them for their purpose -- naming people. Suppose you have a unicode blob of my name in your database and there is a problem and you need to call me and say hi. Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? >I think there're very few exceptions to this, probably something law-related, or if you have to interact with some legacy service. Few exceptions for you is entirety of the service for others. At the very least you interact with legacy software of payment systems which have some ideas about what names should be.

kmoser 2y ago
> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? Are you implying the CSR's lack of familiarity with the pronunciation of your name means your name should be stored/rendered incorrectly?
- Muromec 2y ago
  Quite the opposite actually. I want it stored correctly and in a way that both me and CSR can understand and so it can be used to interface with other systems. I don’t however know which unicode subset to use, because you didn’t tell me in the signup form. I have many options, all of them correct, but I don’t know whether your CSR can read Ukrainian Cyrillic and whether you can tell what vocative case is and not use that when inerfacing with the government CA which expects nominative.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    In this specific case, it seems like your concerns are a hypothetical, no?
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      Not really, no. A lot of us only really have to deal with English-adjacent input (i.e. European languages that share the majority of character forms with English, or cultures that explicitly Anglicise their names when dealing with English folks). As soon as you have to deal with users with a radically different alphabet/input-method, the wheels tend to come off. Can your CSR reps pronounce names written in Chinese logographs? In Arabic script? In the Hebrew alphabet?
      - int_19h 2y ago
        For one thing, this concern applies equally to names written entirely in Latin script. Can your CSR reps correctly pronounce a French name? How about Polish? Hungarian? In any case, the proper way to handle this is to store the name as originally written, and have the app that CSRs use provide a phonetic transcription. Coincidentally, this kind of stuff is something that LLMs are very good at already (but I bet you could make it much more efficient by training a dedicated model for the task).
        account42 2y ago
        This situation is not the same at all. The CSR might mangle a name in latin script but can at least attempt to pronounce it and will end up doing so in a way that the user can understand. Add to that that natives of non-latin languages are already used to this. For better or worse, English and therefore the basic latin script is the lingua franca of the computing age. Having something universal for internation communication is very useful.
        GoblinSlayer 2y ago
        FWIW, proquint encoding allows you to pronounce any sequence of bits, though the need for pronunciation eludes me, just copypaste it.
      - cowsandmilk 2y ago
        You can analyze the name and direct a case to a CSR who can handle it. May be unrealistic for a 1-2 person company, but every 20+ person company I’ve worked at has intentionally hired CSRs with different language abilities.
        michaelt 2y ago
        A requirement to do that is an extremely broad definition of "treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time" IMHO :)
        Muromec 2y ago
  - ACS_Solver 2y ago
    I think you're touching on another problem, which is that we as users rarely know why the form wants a name. Is it to be used in emails, or for sending packages, or for talking to me? My language also has a separate vocative case, but I live in a country that has no concept of it and just vestiges of a case system. I enter my name in the nominative, which then of course looks weird if I get emails/letters from them later - they have no idea to use the vocative. If I knew the form is just for sending me emails, I'd maybe enter my name in the vocative. Engineers, or UX designers, or whoever does this, like to pretend names are simple. They're just not (obligatory reference to the "falsehoods about names" article). There are many distinct cases for why you may want my name and they may all warrant different input. - Name to use in letters or emails. It doesn't matter if a CSR can pronounce this if it's used in writing, it should be a name I like to see in correspondence. Maybe it's in a script unfamiliar to most CSRs, or maybe it's just a vocative form. - Name for verbal communication. Just about anything could be appropriate depending on the circumstances. Maybe an anglicized name I think your company will be able to pronounce, maybe a name in a non-Latin script if I expect it to be understood here, maybe a name in a Latin-extended script if I know most people will still say it reasonably well intuitively. But it could also be an entirely different name from the written one if I expect the written one to be butchered. - Name for package deliveries. If I'm ordering a package from abroad, I want my name (and address) written in my local convention - I don't care if the vendor can't read it, first the package will make its way to my country using the country and postal code identifiers, and then it should have info that makes sense to the local logistics companies, not to the seller's IT system. - Legal name because we're entering a contract or because my ID will be checked later on for some reason. - Machine-readable legal name for certain systems like airlines. For most of the world's population, this is not the same as the legal name but of course English-language bias means this is often overlooked.
    - pezezin 2y ago
      > - Name for package deliveries. If I'm ordering a package from abroad, I want my name (and address) written in my local convention - I don't care if the vendor can't read it, first the package will make its way to my country using the country and postal code identifiers, and then it should have info that makes sense to the local logistics companies, not to the seller's IT system. I am not sure that what you ask is possible, there might be local or international regulations that force them to write all the addresses in a certain way. But on the positive side, I have found that nowadays most online shops provide a free-from field for additional delivery instructions. I live in Japan, and whenever I order something from abroad I write my address in Japanese, and most sellers are nice enough to print it and put it on the side of the box, to make the life of the delivery guys easier.
hobs 2y ago
Absolutely not - do not build anything based on "would your CSR be able to pronounce" something - that's an awful bar - most CSRs cant pronounce my name - would I be excluded from your database? Seriously, what are you going for here?
- Muromec 2y ago
  That’s the most basic consideration for names, unless you only show it to the user themselves — other people have to be able to read it at least somehow. Which one is why the bag of unicode bytes approach is as wrong as telling Stęphań he has an invalid name.
  - hobs 2y ago
    Absolutely not. There's no way to understand what a source user's reading capability is. There's no way to understand how a person will pronounce their name by simply reading it, this only works for common names.
  - soco 2y ago
    And here we go again, engineers expecting the world should behave fitting their framework du jour. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't care about our engineering bubble and goes on with life - where you can be called !xóõ Kxau or ꦱꦭꦪꦤ or X Æ A-12.
    - account42 2y ago
      Your examples are a great argument why we should not allow people to use arbitrary characters. Special snowflakes will be able to cope, I assure you.
    - Muromec 2y ago
      I can be called what I want and in fact I have perfectly reasonable name that doesn't fit neither ASCII nor FN+LN convention. The thing is, your website accepting whatever utf8 blob my name can be serialized to today, without actually understanding it, makes my life worse, not better.
benatkin 2y ago
> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? Worse case, just drop to hexadecimal.
kgeist 2y ago
>Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? Typical input validation doesn't really solve the problem. For instance, I could enter my name as 'Vrdtpsk,' which is a perfectly valid ASCII string that passes all validation rules, but no one would be able to pronounce it correctly. I believe the representative (if on a call) should simply ask the customer how they would like to be addressed. Unless we want to implement a whitelist of allowed names for customers to choose from...
- manarth 2y ago
  Derek would like a word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ
Intermernet 2y ago
Many Japanese companies require an alternative name entered in half width kana to alleviate this exact problem. Unfortunately, most Japanese websites have a million other UX problems that overshadow this clever solution to the problem.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  This is a problem specific to languages using Chinese characters where most only know some characters and therefore might not be able to read a specific one. Furigana (which is ultimately what you're providing in a separate field here) is often used as a phonetic reading aid, but still requires you to know Japanese to read and pronounce it correctly. The only generic solution I can think of would be IPA notation, but it would be entirely unreasonable to expect someone to know the IPA for their name, just as it would be unreasonable to expect a random third party to know how to read IPA and replicate the sounds it described.
arghwhat 2y ago
> Suppose you have a unicode blob of my name in your database and there is a problem and you need to call me and say hi. Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? You cannot pronounce the name regardless of whether it is written in ASCII. Pronouncing a name requires at the very least knowledge of the language it originated in, and attempts at reading it with an English pronunciation can range from incomprehensible to outright offensive. The only way to correctly deal with a name that you are unfamiliar with the pronunciation of is to ask how it is pronounced. You must store and operate on the person's name as is. Requiring a name modified, or modifying it automatically, is unacceptable - in many cases legal names must be represented accurately as your records might be used for e.g. tax or legal reasons later.
- account42 2y ago
  > You cannot pronounce the name regardless of whether it is written in ASCII. Pronouncing a name requires at the very least knowledge of the language it originated in, and attempts at reading it with an English pronunciation can range from incomprehensible to outright offensive. Offensive if you WANT to be offended perhaps but definitely understandable, which is the main thing that matters.
- Muromec 2y ago
  >You must store and operate on the person's name as is. Requiring a name modified, or modifying it automatically, is unacceptable But this is simply not true in practice and at times it's just plain wrong in theory too. The in practice part is trivially discoverable in the real world. As to in theory -- I do in fact want a properly functioning service to use my name in a vocative case (which requires modifying it automatically or having a dictionary of names) in their communications that are sent in my native language. Not doing that is plainly grammatically wrong and borderline impolite. In fact I use services that do it just right. I also don't want to know to specify the correct version myself, as it's trivially derivable through established rules of the languages.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    Sure, there are sites that mistreat names in ways you describe, but that does not make it correct. > I do in fact want a properly functioning service to use my name in a vocative case. ... I also don't want to know to specify the correct version myself, as it's trivially derivable through established rules of the languages. There would be nothing to discuss if this was trivial. > Not doing that is plainly grammatically wrong and borderline impolite. Do you know what's more than borderline impolite? Getting someone's name wrong, or even claiming that their legal name is invalid and thereby making it impossible for them to sign up. If getting a name right and using a grammatical form are mutually exclusive, there is no argument to be had about which to prioritize.
red_admiral 2y ago
> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? If the user is Chinese and the CSR is not - probably no, and that's not a Unicode issue.
- account42 2y ago
  Yet the CSR will be able to adequately pronounce a romanized ASCII-only version of the chinese name. And that's an entirely reasonable thing to do for western organizations and governments just like you might need to get a chinese name to interact with the chinese bureaucracy.

kmoser 2y ago

> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? Are you implying the CSR's lack of familiarity with the pronunciation of your name means your name should be stored/rendered incorrectly?

Muromec 2y ago
Quite the opposite actually. I want it stored correctly and in a way that both me and CSR can understand and so it can be used to interface with other systems. I don’t however know which unicode subset to use, because you didn’t tell me in the signup form. I have many options, all of them correct, but I don’t know whether your CSR can read Ukrainian Cyrillic and whether you can tell what vocative case is and not use that when inerfacing with the government CA which expects nominative.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  In this specific case, it seems like your concerns are a hypothetical, no?
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    Not really, no. A lot of us only really have to deal with English-adjacent input (i.e. European languages that share the majority of character forms with English, or cultures that explicitly Anglicise their names when dealing with English folks). As soon as you have to deal with users with a radically different alphabet/input-method, the wheels tend to come off. Can your CSR reps pronounce names written in Chinese logographs? In Arabic script? In the Hebrew alphabet?
    - int_19h 2y ago
      For one thing, this concern applies equally to names written entirely in Latin script. Can your CSR reps correctly pronounce a French name? How about Polish? Hungarian? In any case, the proper way to handle this is to store the name as originally written, and have the app that CSRs use provide a phonetic transcription. Coincidentally, this kind of stuff is something that LLMs are very good at already (but I bet you could make it much more efficient by training a dedicated model for the task).
      - account42 2y ago
        This situation is not the same at all. The CSR might mangle a name in latin script but can at least attempt to pronounce it and will end up doing so in a way that the user can understand. Add to that that natives of non-latin languages are already used to this. For better or worse, English and therefore the basic latin script is the lingua franca of the computing age. Having something universal for internation communication is very useful.
        GoblinSlayer 2y ago
        FWIW, proquint encoding allows you to pronounce any sequence of bits, though the need for pronunciation eludes me, just copypaste it.
    - cowsandmilk 2y ago
      You can analyze the name and direct a case to a CSR who can handle it. May be unrealistic for a 1-2 person company, but every 20+ person company I’ve worked at has intentionally hired CSRs with different language abilities.
      - michaelt 2y ago
        A requirement to do that is an extremely broad definition of "treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time" IMHO :)
      - Muromec 2y ago
- ACS_Solver 2y ago
  I think you're touching on another problem, which is that we as users rarely know why the form wants a name. Is it to be used in emails, or for sending packages, or for talking to me? My language also has a separate vocative case, but I live in a country that has no concept of it and just vestiges of a case system. I enter my name in the nominative, which then of course looks weird if I get emails/letters from them later - they have no idea to use the vocative. If I knew the form is just for sending me emails, I'd maybe enter my name in the vocative. Engineers, or UX designers, or whoever does this, like to pretend names are simple. They're just not (obligatory reference to the "falsehoods about names" article). There are many distinct cases for why you may want my name and they may all warrant different input. - Name to use in letters or emails. It doesn't matter if a CSR can pronounce this if it's used in writing, it should be a name I like to see in correspondence. Maybe it's in a script unfamiliar to most CSRs, or maybe it's just a vocative form. - Name for verbal communication. Just about anything could be appropriate depending on the circumstances. Maybe an anglicized name I think your company will be able to pronounce, maybe a name in a non-Latin script if I expect it to be understood here, maybe a name in a Latin-extended script if I know most people will still say it reasonably well intuitively. But it could also be an entirely different name from the written one if I expect the written one to be butchered. - Name for package deliveries. If I'm ordering a package from abroad, I want my name (and address) written in my local convention - I don't care if the vendor can't read it, first the package will make its way to my country using the country and postal code identifiers, and then it should have info that makes sense to the local logistics companies, not to the seller's IT system. - Legal name because we're entering a contract or because my ID will be checked later on for some reason. - Machine-readable legal name for certain systems like airlines. For most of the world's population, this is not the same as the legal name but of course English-language bias means this is often overlooked.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    > - Name for package deliveries. If I'm ordering a package from abroad, I want my name (and address) written in my local convention - I don't care if the vendor can't read it, first the package will make its way to my country using the country and postal code identifiers, and then it should have info that makes sense to the local logistics companies, not to the seller's IT system. I am not sure that what you ask is possible, there might be local or international regulations that force them to write all the addresses in a certain way. But on the positive side, I have found that nowadays most online shops provide a free-from field for additional delivery instructions. I live in Japan, and whenever I order something from abroad I write my address in Japanese, and most sellers are nice enough to print it and put it on the side of the box, to make the life of the delivery guys easier.

hobs 2y ago

Absolutely not - do not build anything based on "would your CSR be able to pronounce" something - that's an awful bar - most CSRs cant pronounce my name - would I be excluded from your database? Seriously, what are you going for here?

Muromec 2y ago
That’s the most basic consideration for names, unless you only show it to the user themselves — other people have to be able to read it at least somehow. Which one is why the bag of unicode bytes approach is as wrong as telling Stęphań he has an invalid name.
- hobs 2y ago
  Absolutely not. There's no way to understand what a source user's reading capability is. There's no way to understand how a person will pronounce their name by simply reading it, this only works for common names.
- soco 2y ago
  And here we go again, engineers expecting the world should behave fitting their framework du jour. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't care about our engineering bubble and goes on with life - where you can be called !xóõ Kxau or ꦱꦭꦪꦤ or X Æ A-12.
  - account42 2y ago
    Your examples are a great argument why we should not allow people to use arbitrary characters. Special snowflakes will be able to cope, I assure you.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    I can be called what I want and in fact I have perfectly reasonable name that doesn't fit neither ASCII nor FN+LN convention. The thing is, your website accepting whatever utf8 blob my name can be serialized to today, without actually understanding it, makes my life worse, not better.

benatkin 2y ago

> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? Worse case, just drop to hexadecimal.

kgeist 2y ago

>Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? Typical input validation doesn't really solve the problem. For instance, I could enter my name as 'Vrdtpsk,' which is a perfectly valid ASCII string that passes all validation rules, but no one would be able to pronounce it correctly. I believe the representative (if on a call) should simply ask the customer how they would like to be addressed. Unless we want to implement a whitelist of allowed names for customers to choose from...

manarth 2y ago
Derek would like a word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ

Intermernet 2y ago

Many Japanese companies require an alternative name entered in half width kana to alleviate this exact problem. Unfortunately, most Japanese websites have a million other UX problems that overshadow this clever solution to the problem.

arghwhat 2y ago
This is a problem specific to languages using Chinese characters where most only know some characters and therefore might not be able to read a specific one. Furigana (which is ultimately what you're providing in a separate field here) is often used as a phonetic reading aid, but still requires you to know Japanese to read and pronounce it correctly. The only generic solution I can think of would be IPA notation, but it would be entirely unreasonable to expect someone to know the IPA for their name, just as it would be unreasonable to expect a random third party to know how to read IPA and replicate the sounds it described.

arghwhat 2y ago

> Suppose you have a unicode blob of my name in your database and there is a problem and you need to call me and say hi. Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? You cannot pronounce the name regardless of whether it is written in ASCII. Pronouncing a name requires at the very least knowledge of the language it originated in, and attempts at reading it with an English pronunciation can range from incomprehensible to outright offensive. The only way to correctly deal with a name that you are unfamiliar with the pronunciation of is to ask how it is pronounced. You must store and operate on the person's name as is. Requiring a name modified, or modifying it automatically, is unacceptable - in many cases legal names must be represented accurately as your records might be used for e.g. tax or legal reasons later.

account42 2y ago
> You cannot pronounce the name regardless of whether it is written in ASCII. Pronouncing a name requires at the very least knowledge of the language it originated in, and attempts at reading it with an English pronunciation can range from incomprehensible to outright offensive. Offensive if you WANT to be offended perhaps but definitely understandable, which is the main thing that matters.
Muromec 2y ago
>You must store and operate on the person's name as is. Requiring a name modified, or modifying it automatically, is unacceptable But this is simply not true in practice and at times it's just plain wrong in theory too. The in practice part is trivially discoverable in the real world. As to in theory -- I do in fact want a properly functioning service to use my name in a vocative case (which requires modifying it automatically or having a dictionary of names) in their communications that are sent in my native language. Not doing that is plainly grammatically wrong and borderline impolite. In fact I use services that do it just right. I also don't want to know to specify the correct version myself, as it's trivially derivable through established rules of the languages.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Sure, there are sites that mistreat names in ways you describe, but that does not make it correct. > I do in fact want a properly functioning service to use my name in a vocative case. ... I also don't want to know to specify the correct version myself, as it's trivially derivable through established rules of the languages. There would be nothing to discuss if this was trivial. > Not doing that is plainly grammatically wrong and borderline impolite. Do you know what's more than borderline impolite? Getting someone's name wrong, or even claiming that their legal name is invalid and thereby making it impossible for them to sign up. If getting a name right and using a grammatical form are mutually exclusive, there is no argument to be had about which to prioritize.

red_admiral 2y ago

> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly? If the user is Chinese and the CSR is not - probably no, and that's not a Unicode issue.

account42 2y ago
Yet the CSR will be able to adequately pronounce a romanized ASCII-only version of the chinese name. And that's an entirely reasonable thing to do for western organizations and governments just like you might need to get a chinese name to interact with the chinese bureaucracy.