Quoting Geraint North <>:
> Out of interest, what do people use the
> firstname/surname/lastname/givenname distinction for?
Naming conventions are a pet peeve for everyone involved in generating
citations and bibliographies for scholarly publications. Scientific
journals and publishers have fairly strict rules how to display names
of authors and editors. In order to do that, you need to know the
function of each part of the name. Assume the journal wants the names
displayed as "Last, First M.". A guy named Luis Lopez Penabad would
obviously be displayed as "Penabad, Luis L." although this is all
wrong. He is Spanish, has one firstname (Luis) and two lastnames
(Lopez Penabad), one from each of his parents. The correct display
form is therefore "Lopez Penabad, Luis". The
firstname/surname/lastname/givenname elements somewhat help to get
this right, although you still face lots of problems with non-Western
names, and even with some standard US names. E.g. if a person goes by
his second "firstname", like L. Clinton Webb, the current DocBook
markup has a hard time to catch this.
regards,
Markus
--
Markus Hoenicka
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de
