Quoting Geraint North <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka") http://www.mhoenicka.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
