- From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:27:15 +0100
- To: Gunnar Bittersmann <gunnar@bittersmann.de>
- CC: www-international@w3.org
On 03/08/2011 20:51, Gunnar Bittersmann wrote: > I wrote (2011-07-30 17:23+02:00): >> some small things. I save the big things for another mail. > > Which is now (along with some more small things). It’s the last part > from my side, I hope. > > >> Only the second paragraph makes clear what names the first paragraph is >> about. I suggest to add 'Icelandic': In the Icelandic name Björk >> Guðmundsdóttir … > > The same can be said about section Different order of parts that reads > “In the name 毛泽东”. Make it “In the Chinese name 毛泽东”. Done. > > > There’s a typo in section Scenarios: “You are designing a form in a one > language”. (Remove “a”.) Fixed. > > > In section Other things, name prefixes like 'van' or 'de' are mentioned. > It might be well in the scope of the article to point out that these > prefixes not only cause problems for automatically splitting up names, > but also for sorting: Ludwig van Beethoven would be filed under B, while > Steven Van Zandt would be filed under V. > > > It might also be worth mentioned that a special sorting system applies > to names in German phonebooks: umlauts 'ä', 'ö', 'ü' are treated as > 'ae', 'oe', 'ue', whereas in dictionaries umlauts are treated as 'a', > 'o', 'u'. > > (The reason is that a name can be spelled differently, e.g. Müller or > Mueller. To make it easier to someone who does not know the spelling of > a particular person, Müllers and Muellers are not separated (with > potentially other names in between) but mixed: e.g. > Müller, Anton > Mueller, Berta > Müller, Carl) > > Yet another sorting system is used in Austria, cf. German Wikipedia > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetische_Sortierung > > > Section Inheritance of names reads “It may be better, in these cases, > for a form to say 'Previous name' than 'Maiden name' or 'née'.” Is > 'Previous name' commonly used in the English-speaking world? It might be > confusing when a person changes his/her name on marriage more than once > in his/her lifetime. 'Name of birth' would be more accurate, IMHO. > > ('Previous name' appers again in section Other things.) 'Previous name' is indeed fairly common on English forms I've seen. > > > Section To split or not to split? reads “avoid limiting the field size > for names in your database.” I wholeheartly agree from the i18n POV, but > this is surely not what a database designer (MySQL and the like) would > want to do for performance reasons. So for technical reason the advice > for fields with variable lenghts is questionable. > > How about adding something like “If this it not an option, be sure to > save enough space”? > > > The last sample form in section Implications for character support (the > one with 'Name (in your alphabet)' and 'Name (Latin alphabet)' should be > designed in a way that a user whose native script is Latin does not have > to retype her name a second time (that would make for a bad user > experience). I agree. I also changed the wording of the second input field label to read "Latin transcription (if different)". > > Gunnar > > -- Richard Ishida Internationalization Activity Lead W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) http://www.w3.org/International/ http://rishida.net/ Register for the W3C MultilingualWeb Workshop! Limerick, 21-22 September 2011 http://multilingualweb.eu/register
Received on Thursday, 11 August 2011 12:27:41 UTC