10 ms·

As long as we're playing the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" game again, here's the relevant patio11 article: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/

• speeder 13y ago
  My name fail to register surprisingly often, even here in Brazil. It is Hélder Maurício Gomes Ferreira Filho Common reasons for failure is being too long and having non ASCII characters, but sometimes it fails for other reasons, for example do not allow me to register without a middle name ( I don't haven't one actually... ), me confused and not knowing how to register Filho ( it is not a family name, neither a surname or a last name, but it is still part of my name. It means Son, my father has the same name as me, without the Filho part), or breaking when it cross check with somewhere ( for several reasons I ended registering my name in several different ways, usually omitting Hélder, that I did not even knew was on my name until I got to school and got forced to use because of stupid rules that assume your first name is your typical name )
  • pmelendez 13y ago
    > "having non ASCII characters" Accented vowels are ASCII characters but in the extended set which people sometimes don't take account.
    • speeder 13y ago
      Or they account wrongly ;) (ie: from the wrong set) I love how sometimes even on the same company, each place account ASCII differently. I remember registering for a IM, and in one info screen my name was Maur&cio and in the site info screen Maur€cio and in the search screen was Maur£cio and so on...
      • tracker1 13y ago
        ASCII is Obviously meant to use CP437 for character codes 128-254, duh... Seriously though, most other code pages are pretty transparent to/from unicode... IBM PC-DOS extended ascii (classic ANSI-BBS) isn't so transparent.
    • keithwinstein 13y ago
      Generally not. On the Internet, ASCII generally means ANSI_X3.4-1968, a 7-bit standard with 128 code points. (Run "man ascii" on a Unix system to see this.) There aren't any accented characters. By contrast, there were national variants of ISO/IEC 646 (also a 7-bit character set, and essentially the internationalized version of ASCII) that included accented characters within those 128 code points. Generally these swapped out things like the at-sign (@) and the curly braces and vertical pipe character for accented vowels instead. There were also lots of 8-bit character sets in ISO/IEC 8859 (e.g. Latin-1, or ISO/IEC 8859 part 1) that included accented characters within the "extended" set of code points 128-255.
    • masklinn 13y ago
      There are a number of different "extended set" (IBM code pages and ISO/IEC 8859 parts for instance), and they're "extended" because they're not ASCII but supersets of it (as is UTF-8). ASCII is the 7-bit encoding ANSI_X3.4-1968, composed of 95 printable and 33 control characters.
    • derleth 13y ago
      Extended ASCII is not ASCII. There is ASCII, which has no accented characters, and there are other character encodings based on ASCII, which often do. Those other character encodings are not ASCII.
  • masklinn 13y ago
    > It means Son, my father has the same name as me, without the Filho part Interesting, that's similar to Junior in the US, but there it generally isn't part of the "official" name, only informal.
    • njharman 13y ago
      Jr. is absolutely part of my official name in the USA. It is the only distinction between my and my father's name. Many forms have a specific spot for suffix.
      • jonlucc 13y ago
        Are you implying that two people (you and your father) can't have identical names in the US?
        • auctiontheory 13y ago
          Of course not! That would break the Computer.
          • lostlogin 13y ago
            One memorable day at work a POS Kodak system decided that it wouldn't store a particular record. Nothing worked. This happened a few times until it became clear that the only things these cases had in common was that the people's first names started BRE. I can remember a rather sad looking IT manager nodding with agreement having tried everything when I suggested we just get them to change their names. Bug is still there. It's just a historic archive now, thank god. Worst software ever.
        • njharman 13y ago
          No I'm stating that Jr. is an official part of Norman John Harman Jr., my name. It is on my birth certificate, filled out on my tax return, etc. In any case were I'm required to use my real name if I used Norman John Harman Sr. I would be committing fraud. Likewise fraud if I left off the Jr. in an attempt to confuse with or impersonate my father.
  • goodcanadian 13y ago
    I found your comments on "Filho" interesting. In English, the equivalent is "Junior" with the father sometimes using "Senior." It is not part of your name per se, and thus would not be typed into the name field of a form. However, in places where naming sons after their fathers is common, there is often be an additional drop down box listing (Jr, Sr, I, II, III, and so on).
    • walshemj 13y ago
      thats why the x.400 and 500 standards had the concept of generational qualifiers.
    • speeder 13y ago
      Oh yeah, these drop boxes piss me off, specially because here in Brazil there is BOTH Junior and Filho... And I am Filho, not Junior. (also we have "Neto" that means Grandson, it is quite popular, I know a bunch of guys like that, I don't think dro down boxes in other countries will expect that)
      • aestra 13y ago
        Prefix and Suffix should be free form text!
  • gcb0 13y ago
    As a Portuguese speaker, i can say i would never write Hélder correctly if i simply hear it.
    • speeder 13y ago
      For a long time I did not even knew how to pronounce Hélder. The thing is Dutch... I am Hélder because of my father. He is Hélder, because of the priest "Dom Hélder Câmara" (my Grandma was very Catholic) Dom Hélder Câmara was named after the city of Den Helder in the Netherlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Helder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Helder The result is kinda wonky (lots of people write it wrong, usually "Elder" that of course resulted into video game savy friends nicknaming me "Mr. Scrolls")
  • anotherevan 13y ago
    It get's worse. A friend of mine has a hyphenated name, "Kerry-Jean". The hyphen alone often breaks things.
    • mindslight 13y ago
      Hyphenated last names seem to break many customer service people - they'll do things like insist one is the "real" name, assume you are married and ask when, etc. I think it's that hyphen is such a simple thing, it screams "understand me!" instead of simply being entered verbatim.
      • aestra 13y ago
        Assuming hyphen = married = wife's father's name-husband's father's name is just so ignorant. I've known many people who have always have hyphenated names, a few I've gone to primary school with. I have a good friend with an always-hyphenated-last-name who gets asked personal questions by strangers and near strangers about her name. How about "It isn't any of your business, I can have as many names as I want?"
    • Dove 13y ago
      My best friend in elementary school had the misfortune of a hyphenated last name that was exactly sixteen characters long. The systems at the school evidently limited you to fifteen characters, because I saw her name printed in a lot of places without the final character.
    • anotherevan 13y ago
      In this case, "Kerry-Jean" is her first name. (Just to be clear.)
• sehrope 13y ago
  In our app we neither validate nor escape user strings for any free form text (eg. "names" and descriptions)[1]. We only validate the max length. If text is truly free form then you don't need to validate or white list anything. Just make sure it's valid UTF-8 (or whatever encoding you're using) and escape it when you display it. That combined with using prepared statements with bind variables (aka named parameters) and you don't have any issues with user inputs. One other benefit of this approach is that you end up with proper i18n support without doing anything special. From your apps perspective all text is the same. If user's want to use unicode characters or put html tags in their descriptions then let them. If you escape it then there's no XSS issue. Plus it's WYSIWYG[2] from a user's perspective. Who am I to judge that a user putting "<script>alert('Haxors!');</script>" as the name of an object is a bad idea? [1]: "Names" don't include usernames which generally should have a whitelisted character set (ex: ASCII [a-z][a-z0-9+]) or email addresses (use a a real validator ... not a regex!). [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wysiwyg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wysiwyg
  • keithwinstein 13y ago
    Just to be a bit pedantic, unfortunately you don't get "proper i18n support" just by putting everything in UTF-8. Unicode lets you represent lots of abstract characters, from different languages and societies, in one character set. That doesn't quite tell you how to render the characters. For that, you need to know what language the text is in. Unicode wants you to provide that information out-of-band, e.g. in an HTML "lang" attribute, which the renderer can use to paint the proper glyphs. For example, the Arabic digits 4 through 7 (۴ U+06F4 .. ۷ U+06F7) have different glyphs in Persian, Sindhi, and Urdu. And a character like 直 (U+76F4) has Chinese and Japanese glyphs that may not be mutually recognizable. Bottom line: if you want an internationalized system that can store and render multilingual text, storing the text in Unicode is a good start, but you will need to store additional info (like the language) to be able to properly render the text.
    • DougWebb 13y ago
      I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals which shows examples of the differences in those numerals, but it looks like the different representations have different Unicode codepoint. So, there's no need for the lang attribute. (The page uses them, but if you take them off there's no difference in the display.) You probably need to know the language to do things like sorting, comparison, regex, etc. But if you're just storing and displaying user-entered strings and your software has no need to understand the meaning of the strings, I think it's enough to do what the parent says.
• mjn 13y ago
  One thing that's annoying to me is that governments and employers increasingly believe many of these things, partly because they want to cross-reference names and match canonical forms. My given names in English are Mark Jason, and that's on my birth certificate. In Greek, they're Μάρκος Ιάσονας, which are the equivalents, and that's on my municipal birth records there (registered as a foreign birth at the time of baptism). There seems to be a move towards wanting to use "accurate" transliterations, though, rather than the more traditional method of translating names to equivalents (Mark<->Markos, George<->Georgios, Paul<->Pavlos, etc.). Sometimes people desire that: maybe someone named Михаил in Russian really doesn't want to be turned into Michael, but wants to go by Mikhail. That's fine, if they prefer. But in my case, I consider each of these translated forms to be my name in the respective languages, and do not consider the transliterated forms to be my name. But in trying to sort out some paperwork, it appears that what I am supposed to do is one of these two things: 1) change my name in English from Mark Jason to Markos Iasonas, the transliteration of my Greek name; or 2) change my name in Greek from Μάρκος Ιάσονας to Μαρκ Τζέισον, the transliteration of my English name. But I don't want to do either of those things. #2 in particular is ridiculous, because it doesn't decline properly, and is trying to approximate a 'j' sound with 'tz'.
  • moheeb 13y ago
    Change it to Mapcock.
  • nobodysfool 13y ago
    Yea, my daughter's name is a bit unusual, and so the transliteration produces a different name than english. Her name is Thamina. It's an Arabic origin name, so in Arabic it's : ثمينة. Not that she's Arabic at all, she's part Russian, and was born in Russia, so her name is Тхамина in Russian. They transliterate her name in a standard way to Tkhamina on her Russian passport, but on her USA passport it's Thamina.
  • R_Edward 13y ago
    Growing up, my parents called me by my middle name, as I share a first name with my dad. (I'd rather be an Edward than a Ralph anyway.) When giving my name to someone, I tell them I'm Edward <Lastname>, as telling them I'm R. Edward <Lastname> just sounds pretentious. But if I'm beginning a relationship with a doctor's office or lawyer, or filling in a tax form, it's Ralph E. Lastname, because that's what's on my birth certificate and SSA record. It is quite annoying when the phone rings, and I don't recognize the calling number, so I answer with a guarded, "This is Ed..." and hear the caller ask, "May I speak to Ralph?" and have to explain to them that I really am Ralph, even though I said I was Ed. But I have to say, my problems are nothing compared to yours! CSB: My mom signed me up for a book club when I was 6 or 7. For the Firstname field, she wrote, "R Edward" for reasons known only to her. For the next three years, every couple months, I'd get a package addressed to Redward <Lastname>. I could just imagine the shipping clerk in that company reading my shipping label and saying to himself, "Redward... what a goofy name."
• im3w1l 13y ago
  This list is useless, because trying to follow it is impossibly ambitious. Which of these do I need to support for my system to work for X% of users with X+Y % being able to work around the limitations?
  • Piskvorrr 13y ago
    Logical fallacy (bifurcation): either you correctly implement all of the requirements, or it makes no sense trying at all. Note that the article even explicitly says "try to make _fewer_ of these assumptions," not "you MUST explicitly support all this." Similar example: Do you lock your door, or does that make no sense to you? (Because if there's no absolute, perfect, 100% protection, there's apparently no difference at all between locked, closed and wide open; right?)
    • Semiapies 13y ago
      Logical fallacy (non sequitur), as the comment you're responding to said nothing of the kind, and argued specifically for a middle point in the second of only two sentences.
  • Mvandenbergh 13y ago
    You don't need to explicitly support them if you just treat "name" as a freeform, unicode text field.
    • Piskvorrr 13y ago
      Well, you can still get bitten by "11. People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points," as well as the sets 1-8 and 32-36 (people have exactly X names at a given point in time, where X>0); that's not to mention ordering and collation (12,13,18,30). But it's definitely the easiest option, and avoids many common pitfalls (if I had a nickel for every database using latin1 + latin1_swedish_ci because that's the first charset + collation in the list, I'd have a lot of nickels).
      • Mvandenbergh 13y ago