The other day, we were alerted to the fact that users weren’t able to share their real names. It turned out that special characters, including dashes and apostrophes, weren’t accepted as part of names. Hyphenated names (Jordan-Ross) and names that include apostrophes (Tra’von) are common; ensuring that names can use appropriate punctuation is essential!
The W3C has a wonderful article on the topic of names (“Personal names around the world“). For example, it points out that the standard practice of asking for two separate fields, “first” and “last,” is itself far less than ideal. Overall, excellent food for thought!
