Q1
At this moment the first letter of each word in the surname is automatically upper-cased on save. However, a lot of Dutch surnames start with (a) prefix(es) which should not start with an upper-cased letter, some examples: “Bob de Bouwer” “Liesbeth van List” “Jaap van den Akker” “Joost van der Plas”.
Q2 - Who is impacted?
This only impacts Dutch users and possibly users of other countries using the same/similar naming constructs.
Q3 - Why is it important and/or urgent?
This is kind of trivial, only a bit of a nuisance, but would be nice to have addressed for quite a lot of Dutch (potential) users and possibly user from other countries.
Q4 - What is your proposed solution? (optional)
I see two possible solutions to this;
Add a “surname prefix(es)” field besides the first- and lastname
Disable automatic formatting of the surname in which the first letter in (each word of) the surname is capitalized.
TL;DR: pretty much any assumption you can make about someone’s name is going to be false for some people; the only reasonable way you can represent people’s names in a computer system is to just have a single “name” field (or multiple fields capturing preferred names in different contexts, if that is deemed necessary), and allow users to format their own name however they want. If you absolutely must have first name / last name fields, then at least assume that however the user types it, including capitalization and punctuation, is the most appropriate way of rendering their name in that format.
And it’s not just Dutch names. “Problematic” names exist in practically all cultures.
I totally agree on both of your feedback/suggestions. The only reason why one would use separate fields for first/middle/last names is to be able to sort in overviews, for example on by surname, which is not really that important in my opinion and would just cause unnecessary complexity.
