Re: [Refdb-users] Re: The case against <middlename>

[<Jus...@UL...>]

Hi,

I've followed the discussion with interest. Let me try to complicate
things even further:

- Some people have more than two given names.

- Some people with more than one given name do not use their first
  given name in daily life ("F. John Smith"), effectively reversing
  the roles of first and middle names.

- While we're at it, we might want to include double names in the
  discussion (Jean-Fran=E7ois =3D J.-F., Anne-Marie =3D A.-M.).

- There are people who treat their given names equally, even without a
  dash; this is quite common in Latin America.

- In some cultures, people have more than one family name, and they
  should be treated equally (also Latin America).

In general, I think that structure should be defined by markup and not
by string parsing conventions (that's what XML is for after all:
unambiguous definition of structure). On the other hand, multiple
names that belong together and should be treated equally may perhaps
be kept together, as it avoids tons of markup and is easily parsed by
spaces or hyphens.

Thus, I propose something like the following:

<personal>James</personal>
<given>C.</given>
<given>D.</given>
<family>Scott</family>

<personal>Raman</personal>

<given>F.</given>
<personal>John</personal>
<family>Smith</family>

<personal>Jean-Fran=E7ois</personal>
<family>Dubois</family>

<personal>Jos=E9 Antonio</personal>
<family>Garcia Fernandez</family>

I'd prefer to put each name into a separate element, but that would
require a surrounding element to group them together, along with a way
to specify the separator (space? dash?).

Comments?

Justus H. (grin)

--=20
Justus H. Piater, Ph.D.         http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~piater/
Institut Montefiore, B28        Phone: +32-4-366-2279
Universit=E9 de Li=E8ge, Belgium    Fax:   +32-4-366-2620