First/Last = bad/ambiguous Family (or maybe inherited) / Given = good Thanks, Donald ============================= Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1-508-333-2270 (cell) 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA d3e3e3@xxxxxxxxx On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Cyrus Daboo <cyrus@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Simon, > > > --On July 11, 2013 at 3:58:10 PM +0200 Simon Perreault > <simon.perreault@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >>> We submitted two drafts to help people here to correctly call chinese >>> people names: >>> >>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-deng-call-chinese-names-00 >>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zcao-chinese-pronounce-00 >> >> >> Very cool! Thanks for writing this! >> >> I have a question: I think I've seen Chinese names written in both >> orders. That is, sometimes "Hui Deng" will be written "Deng Hui". Am I >> right? Does this happen often? What is the most common order? Is there a >> way to guess what order a name is written in? Sometimes it's not easy >> for non-Sinophones to know which part is the given name and which part >> is the family name. > > > Well that actually brings up a good technical point! > > In iCalendar (RFC5545) we have properties to represent the organizer and > attendee of meetings. A parameter (attribute) of those properties is "CN" - > defined to be the "common name" of the corresponding calendar user. > Obviously that is a single string and typically the concatenation of first > name/last name. But that of course is a very "Western" approach. > > I have had several people request that iCalendar instead define new > parameters for "FIRST-NAME" and "LAST-NAME". That then gives clients the > option of re-ordering those for display purposes based on user locales and > preferences. > > So, from a technical standpoint, it seems better to always represent user > names using components (last, first, middle)? vCard does have an "N" > property where individual components of a name can be broken out. > > -- > Cyrus Daboo >