Re: New article draft: Personal names around the world

Hello Richard,

Just a few comments:

Background

"People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies in 
English-speaking countries are often unaware how different people’s 
names can be in other countries."

Why is this specific to English-speaking countries? It can easily happen 
in any country. In some places, people may be aware of two or three 
(rather than just one) convention, but they'll still just miss most of 
the others.

"Don't forget to allow people to use hyphens, apostrophes, etc. in 
names. Don't require names to be entered in upper case - this can be 
difficult on a mobile device.": These two advices don't seem to be 
related, better to take them apart. Re. upper case, why would anybody 
want to force that? What exactly does it mean: All upper case, or just 
partially upper case? All upper case is a bad idea because casing is 
often part of the name. Also, you should probably say something about 
prefixes and suffixes (de,... in French, von in German, jr. in the US,...).

"ask the user to submit their name": to avoid gender complications 
without being ungrammatical, why not "ask the users to submit their names"

"Name (in your alphabet)" doesn't work for scripts that are not alphabets.

"Herr Doktor Profesor Schmidt" would sound weird, "Herr Professor Doktor 
Schmidt" is correct.

Regards,   Martin.

On 2011/05/29 19:54, Richard Ishida wrote:
> Folks,
>
> A while back we agreed in a telecon that it would be a good idea to
> convert my blog post on personal names to a w3c article. In my free time
> this weekend I have produced a first draft (that extends the blog post) at
>
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
>
> Please take a look at it with a view to whether we should send for wide
> review at this point.
>
> Thanks,
>
> RI
>
>
>
> PS: Addison, can we agenda+ this for the next meeting?
>
>

Received on Monday, 30 May 2011 01:55:37 UTC