- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 15:08:29 +0200
- To: "Jonathan Rosenne" <rosenne@qsm.co.il>
- CC: "'John Cowan'" <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>, "'Misha Wolf'" <Misha.Wolf@reuters.com>, <public-webont-comments@w3.org>, "'Www International'" <www-international@w3.org>
On Wednesday, April 2, 2003, 3:52:22 PM, Jonathan wrote: JR> So, I would suggest "full presentation name" vs. "culturally dependant JR> sortable name". That has the advantage of being highly precise and the disadvantage of requiring a couple of paragraphs of explanations and examples for anyone to understand it. It also has the disadvantage of throwing away useful information for those cultures that do use it. I gave the example at the recent Unicode conference where Inuit children might change the 'family' part of their name every six months to a year depending on which family they are currently living with; thus any governmental record system that picks the 'family name' at some point in time to use as primary key is not going to work. I also pointed out that just because this happens for those people, it does not mean that the family name concept looses allvalue for everyone. Its surely possible to have a system which has value for 95% of the sample and the other 5% lists the exceptions. Something does not have to be 100% applicable for it to be useful, provided the remaining few percent are treated as valid but exceptional cases, rather than errors. -- Chris mailto:chris@w3.org
Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2003 08:08:54 UTC