xml-dev - onomastical

[Lou Burnard <lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>]

[can't resist side issues; sorry]

On Tue, 16 May 2000, John Cowan wrote:

|Separate first-name and last-name elements are not good internationalization,
|because some people don't have identifiable first names and last names,
|or if they do, they may not mean what you expect; e.g. Hungarian, Japanese,
|and Chinese names have the family name first.

I would argue that au contraire separating first and last name
elements *is* good internationalization precisely because different
cultures handle treatment of names differently. if you tag family name
and given name distinctly, for example, then you can display them in
the appropriate order as well as processing them correctly without any
redundancy.

|
|It's probably better to use "cname" (common name) and "sname" (surname or
|sortable name) elements, where sname is typically last name and cname is
|typically the whole name in normal order.  That way
|<cname>John Cowan</cname><sname>Cowan</sname> works
|well, but so does <cname>Murata Makoto</cname><sname>Murata</sname>.
|The minor redundancy is well worth it.

Or maybe
<persName><surname>Murata</surname><givenName>Makoto</givenName></persName>



If you're really keen to do onomastics, you can find some interesting
suggestions about possibly useful tags and ways of handling them in
the TEI Guidelines chapter on names and dates
(http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/Guidelines/ND.htm)


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 Lou Burnard                           http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou      
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