Name fields in account request (<http://www.w3.org/Help/Account/Request/Public>): bad i18n

The W3C maintains a form
(<http://www.w3.org/Help/Account/Request/Public>) through which
members of the public can request an account with the W3C. When I
submitted a request through said form, I received an e‐mail message
prompting me to complete my request. The form has fields for “First
name” and “Last name”. The e‐mail message describes my first name as
“Given name” and describes my last name as “Family name”. In large
swaths of East Asia (such as China, Japan, and Korea [the CJK area],
home to hundreds of millions of users of the World Wide Web), the
convention is that the first name is the family name, so the
discrepancy is semantic as well as terminological.

The quick fix would be to change the form to match the e‐mail: write
“Given name” and “Family name” for the field labels. A better fix
would be to prompt the requester for the requester’s name using a
single field with the label “Name”. A generic name field would allow
requesters to write family name first. A generic name field would also
allow requesters who have just a given name (as is common in Indonesia
and Iceland, among other places) to use only that name, requesters who
prefer their middle names to their given names to use their middle
names, and other necessities of i18n
(internationalization/internationalisation).

If W3C accounts carry legal ramifications, a better fix yet is to
prompt the requester for the requester’s name using a single field
with the label “Your legal name in your jurisdiction”.

Received on Saturday, 12 June 2010 17:39:59 UTC