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I do some part-time work at a non-profit that, ultimately, does super-international (30+ countries) surveys. As you might imagine, this results in a massive da
by jmduke 14y ago
I do some part-time work at a non-profit that, ultimately, does super-international (30+ countries) surveys. As you might imagine, this results in a massive database and my main duty is wrangling the data into a .csv-friendly format.
One of the quick things we learned that "normalization" in the naive sense was an exercise in idiocy.
Breaking names into 'first name' and 'last name'? Hah, right.
Breaking locations into 'country', 'state', and 'city'? Hah, right.
The big solution: don't constrain what someone types in. Constrain how you work with it.
- dbarlett 14y agopatio11's list of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- jackfoxy 14y agoExcellent link. For anyone who has read Moby Dick, remember Queequeg's "mark" is not a symbol in any alphabet or grapheme system.
- MostAwesomeDude 14y agoUntil patio11 amends this post to contain suggestions about doing things right instead of merely telling people that they are doing it wrong, please stop recommending it as reading material. Thanks.
- micampe 14y agoYou are unnecessarily harsh but I’ll help you anyway: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
- minikomi 14y agoFunny that I hit this all the time with Japanese services online. Enter First Name in latin characters: "sorry, invalid characters" ... enter in full width latin characters .. "sorry, invalid characters" I've even encountered sites which only allow hiragana for names - won't even accept katakana!
- wting 14y ago"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." - Postel's Law
- jiggy2011 14y agoI remember signing up to websites in the late 90s that hadn't quite grokked internationalization. "Select your country (required)" , "United Kingdom" , "select your state (required)". Apparently there is such a thing as Alabama , England. Who knew?
- micampe 14y agoThe United Kingdom is technically not a country either http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom Localization is hard.
- hdra 14y agoThe first name and last name thing annoys me the most. I can't use my real name in most online services (yes, Facebook and Google, I am not using my real name, coz I can't!), because my official name is a mononym. When registering for PayPal, I had to sent at least 10 emails to get someone to respond to be able to use my real name for transactions.