Markup for names

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Ca Phun Ung wrote:
>
> OK, then please explain why the XFN and Microformats movement hit center 
> stage if there is no advantage in marking up people's names?

XFN marks up relationships, not just names.


> It's not only useful to those who "love semantics" but also websites 
> that are not Latin based, i.e. Chinese and Japanese. In Chinese names 
> are traditionally distinguished with a underline to indicate it is in 
> fact a name, this has been the case for thousands of years, otherwise it 
> is hard for the reader to distinguish meaning because a person's name is 
> usually taken from common words, such as "dragon", "peace", "gold", 
> "clever" etc.

Aha, now that is a useful use case!


> Sorry, I need to correct myself regarding the above. Punctuations, which 
> includes underlines, only came into being during the Chinese cultural 
> revolution around 1919. Before this there were no punctuations in 
> Chinese literature. So the Chinese got by for thousands of years without 
> any form of underline, period, comma, brackets etc. Punctuation is a 
> western influence. And in recent years underlining people's names have 
> become less and less a norm, though still understood when it happens and 
> usually often used to zero out ambiguity if the person's name is odd or 
> uncommon.

So the question is, is it worth adding a <name> element for this use case? 
(Maybe, given that the target audience would be primarily chinese and 
japanese, we should use a chinese or japanese word for the element name? 
Or maybe the <u> element should be repurposed for names?)

Input from other people familiar with this use case would be very useful.
How is this use case handled today?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2008 17:12:23 UTC