Re: a guy with 5 first names, from I18N comments on P3P, for vCard/RDF

Dan Connolly wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 11:08 +0100, Ivan Herman wrote:
>> Indeed, and van Mierlo's name was by no means unusual by Dutch
>> standards. Although I might consider A.F.M.O. as middle names; I am not
>> really sure what 'middle name' means...
> 
> The term in the vCard spec isn't 'middle name' but 'additional name';
> who knows if that's any clearer...

FWIW: In Dutch, the name to include as the first name in address books
is not necessarily the first first name.

> Is there software that Dutch people commonly use to
> manage their contacts? Does it read/write vCard format?
> Does it exploit anything beyond
> the fullname field? After all, this isn't a philosophical
> excercise; it's software engineering.

That would be standard Outlook for most, I think.

> I didn't put the "van" prefix in any of the n sub-fields.
> Is there one that it belongs in? Does this name get
> alphabetized under 'v' or under 'M' in the phonebook?

It gets alphabetized under 'M'. A list of common Dutch surname prefixes
("tussenvoegsels" in Dutch) can be found at:

    http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussenvoegsel

And in case you're looking for name parsing challenges, I'd suggest you
have a look at the following page :-)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Vennegoor_of_Hesselink


-- 
Arjohn Kampman, Senior Software Engineer
Aduna - Guided Exploration
www.aduna-software.com

Received on Friday, 17 November 2006 16:54:50 UTC