[voidz]

Good article, but visually representing data differently from how it's stored in the database can be a huge PITA. A pet peeve of mine is real names as an example, Dutch family names may have an infix (van, van der, den, van den) which is always in lowercase, and usually is not even an option on non-Dutch websites. You can't leave how to display these things up to the designer: the user has to know (imho) how these are stored. For example, sorting on last name should not happen on the infix, but only by lastname. E.g., "Dijk, van" comes before "Meulen, van der".

For completeness sake, the full names here may be "Bert van Dijk" and "Anne Jan van der Meulen". Also, "Anne Jan" is a single first name, despite the space.

[Mordisquitos]

That reminds me of my own pet peeve regarding anglocentric UI assumptions. Spanish naming customs are 'Given_name First_surname Second_surname' [0], such as for example Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, whose name would be shortened for convenience by dropping the second surname — Pedro Almodóvar. The problem is too many US/Aus/UK developed UIs assume the whole world follows English naming customs, and thus would insist on showing his initials as 'PC' or shortening his full name as 'Pedro A. Caballero'. For reference, that feels as wrong as it would be to an American for a website (assuming Spanish customs) to initialise the director of E.T. and Jurassic Park as 'SA' or display his full name as 'Steven Allan'.

[0] Spanish given names may often be two-words-long (e.g. 'José Manuel') and a surname may less frequently be more than one word (e.g. 'de la Fuente'), but this isn't a necessary detail for my base rant above.

[erikw]

And the inverse is also somewhat common- forms which require both a maternal and paternal surname, and won’t let you continue with just a single surname.

[loloquwowndueo]

That’s not even a totally UI concern. See https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

[narag]

In José Manuel, Manuel would be the middle name, just like in English. It's not a "two-words-long first name". Sometimes first and middle names are coupled like a whole, like it's usual for José Manuel. Also for José-something or Juan-something in general. Other times, the middle name is never used, like in Nicolás Antonio, being the Antonio part extra annoying, because the SS personnel, for some reason, insists in calling me that when it's my turn.

[marcinzm]

Exactly. Especially in something like customer service where they're often helping fix and issue. If they don't know the name is incorrect then they will have a lot harder time figuring out why a downstream system is sending the wrong mail to the customer.

In their example, the change is also much harder to read for me. It takes up just as much space but logical categorical groupings are no longer visible at a glance. Previously you could see all the people from the same zip code, city or state. Now you can't because they're all mixed together at different horizontal offsets. You could also pull out the different information at a glance by using the horizontal offset which you now can't.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

East Asian names (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) can have a great deal of variation in surname/given name positioning.

In my app, I don't even try to separate them. I just give a single string that can handle UTF-8, and let the user do what they want.

However, I also don't need that data for tagging, sorting or anything else, so it's easy for me to say.

[loloquwowndueo]

I’ve been in this boat and then had to justify the choice when integrating with third party vendors whose backends absolutely want names split into first/last components.

We would set up integrations sending the full name in the “first name field” and then a hard coded “notmylastname” string in the “last name field”. And then have about 3 days of back and forth usually including a link to https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... and explaining that no, you can’t reliably use a regular expression to split the full name data into first/last components.