Uche Ogbuji scripsit:
> I think that if you have a straight-up name field, you either end up
> being culturally obtuse or also needing a bunch of parallel fields for
> various collation scenarios.
That's what I meant by the field needing to be repeatable. Chris
Maden devised the system that $EMPLOYER is using, which involves
personNameProfile elements which are themselves repeatable, and which have
children for purpose, pattern (what order to put the textual elements in),
the (meta-)name of this profile, full name, and five elements for name
parts: givenName (repeatable), familyName (repeatable), prefix, suffix,
nickname, and full name, all of which are optional. There is continual
pressure to add middleName, but so far we have effectively resisted it:
canonical U.S. middle names are additional given names.
> I think we can both agree than treating names is harder than most
> developers think, and the point of my advice was to get that pont
> across.
Yes.
> As to the details of structured names, I definitely hear your
> rant. Sometimes I think e.g. TEI's treatment is absolute genius, and
> sometimes I think it's ludicrous over-engineering, and often I carry
> both thoughts at the very same time.
Pointer to that? I'm always interested in designs on this point.
--
John Cowan http://ccil.org/~cowan
It's the old, old story. Droid meets droid. Droid becomes chameleon.
Droid loses chameleon, chameleon becomes blob, droid gets blob back
again. It's a classic tale. --Kryten, Red Dwarf
