[ljm]

It sounds like all you really need to handle names reliably is to ask for the entire name in one field, then have another field for their preferred name (which could be the first name, or the middle name, and a diminutive). And if you need to do something more formal with a title (like Mrs Lastname), potentially have that as a third field.

Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever, and it saves some trouble with localisation.

[DCoder]

W3C recommends the same pattern: [0].

[0]: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

[tomjakubowski]

> Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever

It's astonishing how often this turns out to be true, which has been probably the single most important lesson of my career. I think it's that clever solutions tend to depend on more assumptions, which rarely have P(true) = 1.