[kccqzy]

The idea that a person's name should be parsed and managed by software is amusing to me. How about just getting rid of concepts like "last name" and "first name" (which already embed a lot of cultural assumptions), and only ask for a "full name"? In some countries people don't have both first and last names. In some countries the last name customarily comes before the first name. In some countries the structure of names is more complicated and the son's name includes a copy of his father's name. I don't think software will really handle all these oddities correctly, given that just a single parent can undermine all the system's rules by choosing an unconventional name for their children.

For what it's worth, in Singapore, where there are significant Indian, Chinese, Malay ethnicities but also highly westernized, the government identity card provides just a single full name. Parents can choose their children's names in accordance with their culture—or not. You can put your first name before your last name, after it, or surrounding it. Or include your father's name if needed.

[davidw]

That's the W3's recommendation:

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

[zajio1am]

By ignoring the structure in data acquisition phase, you just postpone decisions about structure to data processing phase, now without necessary information about the structure (which could be obtained in data acquisition phase).

For example, such basic functionality like changing sort order between given name and surname would be much more complicated.

[zajio1am]

Besides, the whole story is about the problem that name including title was in one field and later processing (title removal) misbehaves due to insufficient information.

[jammygit]

Is it important to parse names like that? You can just do a search by substring in most cases