[Bartweiss]

> tell users that something can't be done when the reality is it's entirely possible but the software won't do it

As we digitize increasingly "serious" systems, this is increasing a logistical crisis in addition to a social issue. Variations that would have been trivially handled by even the least helpful of bureaucrats becomes outright impossible to submit to computer systems, often with no channel for appeal or remedy.

The story of Ellis Island screeners changing the spelling of names is infamous, but in that story at least the immigrants ended up with coherent paperwork and a usable name. Today, people with PII that doesn't match software formats are increasingly out of luck. If your name includes 'é', ASCII systems will flatly refuse to accept that. You can enter 'e', but when down the line the ASCII field gets compared to some UTF-8 record of your name, they might well be ruled different people. If you live in Apartment C, you'll suddenly and unhappily learn how many computer systems treat apartment number as a strictly numeric field. And god forbid your apartment has a name, or your street number has a decimal - there isn't even a graceful conversion for those values.

Robust design is the first step here: many systems could easily be adjusted to fail in 1% of the cases as they currently do. But human-focused design on a much larger scale can't be avoided either; when these standardizations _do_ inevitably fail, there needs to be some way of conceding that the system, and not the data, is wrong. As @patio11 put it years ago, "anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them".