Ha! I only look like a biter. I didn’t see your reply, reading down in order, until I had posted mine.

The intranet app I wrote back then was one for password resetting for the 10k+ users of our services inside our company.

The "name" I'm referring to, was actually our normalized, standardized and unique employee-id inside our company.

It actually only allowed /[a-z]/i (IIRC) and no space and is modelled roughly after "given-name"."family-name"

But some of my colleagues allowed users to choose other usernames in our applications, but that's another story.

I never wrote an app requesting users to register with their "real name".

Anyway you two are right and I was wrong.

> If in doubt, refer to the spec.

I did. :)

FWIW: I recently managed to skip a letter in my own family name on a flight ticket I booked online and panicked.

Was no problem at all, turned out that airlines are allowed to accept up to 3 deviations.

I think this is related to the article you and your mother° cited.

°) ;-P

edit

PS: Names_of_Sun_Yat-sen

That article somehow reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LopIroSjsU

And while I agree there is no need to be overly restrictive when it comes to names, some people deserve a good kick in the butt and a little ridicule ... and being forced to come up with a sane version of their name.