RE: [Fwd: Re: PIM Schema ideas]

On Thu, 2002-06-06 at 16:02, Philip Blundell wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-06-06 at 15:54, Noel J. Bergman wrote:
> > The problem I have with the scheme is the presence of the name string in the
> > person table. I might want a more sophisticated name scheme (e.g., title,
> > first, middle, last, suffix). The "name" might the "display name", I
> > suppose.
>
> I actually had in mind that the "name" field would be encoded using some
> kind of mangling scheme like the vCard one. Splitting it up into
> separate SQL fields would be an equally reasonable thing to do, though.

I'd actually warn against splitting up the name fields too much.

It's pretty culturally specific to expect the [Mr] John R Smith [III]
format, and it gets unclear what you should do e.g. about entering
someone whose family name comes first in their name....

Even staying within the narrower range, my father, for example, is 'Iain
Allan' but 'J.N. Allan', while lots of people have more than three
names, or primarily use something other than their first names. Any
scheme which was itself going to deal explicitly with all these
possibilities would be very complex and probably fairly unfriendly to
present to the user.

-- 
Moray