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Comment by GoblinSlayer | Hacker News Reader

There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

Nice, although the pertinent quote is:

"This article doesn't provide all the answers – the best answer will vary according to the needs of the application, and in most cases, it may be difficult to find a 'perfect' solution."

I respectfully disagree with their advice to use “Family name” and “Given name”, over “First name” and “Last name”.

Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated.

Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.

I have a friend who just married a Burmese girl of Indian origin and she just had a single name 'Jennifer'

The point is that First Name and Last Name do not correspond to Family Name and Given Name, which is actually what is desired (you can start an email to me as "Hello <Given Name>", and be reasonably sure of avoiding insult. You can't do that with "Hello <First Name>", you will definitely insult some people).

However, I don't do this. If I want someone's name so I can talk to them, I just ask them "what do you want us to call you?" with a single field (and if they enter "Captain HugePenis" then I cheerfully start the email "Hello Captain HugePenis,"). I only use Given/Family if I need their official name for bureaucracy reasons, and then it's very much "what's your name as it is written in your passport/id?", and I don't use it to address them, because it's very easy to get wrong.

Okay but say a person with an East Asian name fills out your form and dutifully fills out your form with their name in reverse. i.e. if their name is the Chinese equivalent of “Smith John”, they fill it out as given name: John, family name: Smith. Aren’t you going to be rendering their name in the wrong order for all your interactions? How do you know which order to concatenate it?

I think the point is it's a single field so you don't do any concatenation

This. There's two separate concerns: what you call them, and their "official" name.

What you call them is always better done as a separate single field, rather than trying to concatenate the official name fields.

This is why you'd use the single "what do you want to be called?" value (e.g. preferred_name). Then it's not an issue because it's the exact text they provided.

You're mixing up multiple problems. If adding problems is what you want, none of my highschool classmates called each others in the "John" part of anyone's names, and emails beginning with a "Hello $firstname" in my language sounds weird to me anyway. But first/last names are often reused for billing and official purposes, so East Asian(CJK) users would know to fill the "first" with given and "last" with family name if asked that way for official purposes, no matter the visual order or how will it be used. If it's not for official purposes, people are just going to throw in random junks anyway.

I used to use this as a mild form of spam detection, like people do with "+" email aliases, by adding something to the "what do you want us to call you?" field that was specific to the site.

Then, if I started getting spam to that name, I knew who sold me out.

It was especially useful for physical spam mail that wasn't coming to an email address. I discovered quite quickly which magazine gave all my info to every company that wanted it.

In German, you have to ask the customer whether they want to be addressed in the formal way “Sehr geehrter Herr Schmidt” (esteemed Mr. Schmidt might be an approximate translation, of course this sounds totally off in English) or the informal way “Hallo Paul”, or maybe they prefer “Lieber Paul” (dear Paul) or even “Lieber Herr Schmidt”! Note that the formal and informal ways use different parts of the name. So if the website asks me for my name, then I have to rub my crystal ball to figure out which style the company intends to use.

I know that human Germans have problems with knowing when to "du" someone, so how the hell is a website is supposed to know?

The point isn't that it's first and last, it's to avoid an implicit assumption that they are in a particular order. That semantic correspondence is exactly what changing to given/family is supposed to preserve.

Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required.

Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last, but you're always going to run into something from the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names list so unless you can get away with just a single "name" field (and you can't always) it's the better option of the two.

The original sin is assuming that names have a particular structure. But at least First/Last places the burden of that sin not on the user.

My partner has only given names. When forms ask for their “Family name”, my internal thought process goes like this:

1. WTF do I write here?

2. Why are they asking for Family name? Oh they are probably just Anglophone and assume this is how names are.

3. It’s okay, just lie on the form then.

Then I choose their final given name and write it in the family name field.

This kind of enforced microdishonesty grates on the user over time. It certainly makes me grumpy!

First and last name is better because it’s not imposing a structure that may not exist. The burden of that false structure goes on the service rather than the user.

First and last is worse because having first name registered as family name adds extra half a day to your schedule to be spent around support desk, and given/family nomenclature exists because it's just unnecessary pain.

Your partner and billion others from their cultural sphere with single-field name system is a testament that concatenated two-field name system is the problem and is actually not working due to the falsehoods, not that the first/last nomenclature is better than given/family which is much less ambiguous.

Yes, this. Given/family may be bad, but first/last is so much worse.

unfortunately, I need to remember which one of first and last name is family name... I always directly search.

> Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last,

I dunno. The former places the cognitive load on the user. The latter places no additional cognitive load on either party.

After all, what exactly do you mean by "Family Name" and how sure are you that meaning you have is shared by even a significant minority of cultures and people? How many countries have passports that label each name in the name field as a "given" name or a "family name"? How many countries have their revenue service care about whether a "given" name is to be used or a "family" name?

OTOH, to figure out which name is first and which name is last, all the user has to do is look at their ID, which they have presumably seen thousands of times already.

First/last at least has the benefit that, to the user filling in the form, they don't have to think about it - the first name on the ID goes first, the last name on their ID goes last. They can leave out anything in the middle because the form didn't ask them for it!

The problem isn't the NAME, the problem is the addressing of that person which can be only be solved by by adding a field for addressing, and where it can't be solved (titles, honorifics, etc), then given/family name won't solve it either.

> I dunno. The former places the cognitive load on the user. The latter places no additional cognitive load on either party.

It adds cognitive load because I've not seen a system where first/last name is not a synonym for given/family name, except it also indicates the system designer is not aware of alternative ordering for names and is forcing me to decide between correct order/incorrect semantic vs. incorrect order/correct semantic, so it's always a game of guessing what the system will subsequently try to display my name as if I enter it in a certain way.

You don't have to guess. There's an ordering of your names on your ID.

Use that. I'd be surprised if if is different to the one used by your country's revenue service.

If the taxman in your country both knows who you are and has a name for you, that's the correct name, regardless of whether unspoken rules about given/family/calling names exist or not.

So far the consensus of HN hive mind seems you should just give everyone a mandatory nick and optional full name fields and bypass all the formatting issues. It shouldn't be important if situation allows that.

With that said, the idea behind that recommendation is that, the "first" and "last" names in American mind corresponds to, or SHALL correspond to, the European idea of given names(Gates III or John or Jong-Il) and family names(father's name, name of their home communal village of The Vincis, or whatever for greater identities of an individual) respectively, rather than simply being the 1st and 2nd items of your `struct name` in either cases of American name orders and Asian name orders in use, and hence relevant forms for names SHALL be so marked clearly to avoid systems falsely identifying you with your community identifier that comes first in your culture. Doing this makes sense for this context and purpose.

In some languages ”family name” maybe confusing. E.g . in Polish it sometimes (often) mean maiden name (women traditionally replace or add to their last name the last name of their husbands).

So the “pre-marriage” name is referred to as: - “nazwisko panieńskie” (maiden name) - or “nazwisko rodowe” (literally this is “family name”)

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