On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Alex Stinson <[email protected]>wrote:
> The standard use on the English Wikipedia is so that the last name comes > first, the first and last options allow the program to automatically format > it, > It's odd - lots of people seem to prefer (or just perhaps be used to) seeing "Lastname, Firstname" - on another project I worked on, seeing names in this order is one of the top user requests. Splitting a single name into first names and surname is doable, but not entirely trivial. You might think that you could simply hive off the last word from the name, but you have to remember to account for hyphenated double-barrelled surnames, and surnames prefixed with additional words like "von" or "van" (as in Dick Van Dyke). Plus there are a few special cases of people with double barrelled surnames that aren't hypenated (such as "Helena Bonham Carter) which you'd miss and would somehow have to fix by hand. Then, in any views, you'd have to remember to not rely on the surname field being present, as there are plenty of people who don't have (or commonly use) one (eg Madonna and many Brazillian people). So you'd have to have some extra logic defaulting to just using firstnames if surname is blank. Finally, just to confuse matters even more, the convention in some countries in to place the family name before the given name (known as 'Eastern Order') - however, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Name_order, when transliterated into the western alphabet, some people choose to swap the order around, whereas others don't. All in all, you can see why it's conceptually easier to just have a 'name' field for the most common form of someone's name, with 'alternate names' for any other forms...! Frankie -- Frankie Roberto Experience Designer, Rattle 0114 2706977 http://www.rattlecentral.com
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