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"How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, databases, ontologies, etc. for the Web?"

This has basically convinced me that you should only ever have a single (long) "Name" text input.

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Except as pointed out that's generally not sufficient for Japanese since given their kanji based name you'll have no idea how to pronounce or sort it without them also telling you in a separate field how it's pronounced.

There's also the issue of interacting with other systems. You may want just one field but some credit card processor might want 2 etc....

Except in this case your "Dear <insert full name here>" e-mails might not sound very friendly or appropriate.

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