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Nelson Minar
Blog licensed under a Creative Commons License
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Apparently it's news to almost every web developer out there, but in the
real world people's names have spaces in them. My name is "Nelson
Minar". It is not "Nelson_Minar" or "NelsonMinar" or "NelsonM" or
"Nelson397" or any of the other nonsense I have to use to work with some
website who's decided to constrain names to some 1980s software-friendly
character subset.
The hardest part of signing up for a new site these days is picking a unique user name. It's annoying to have to remember different names. And it's really obnoxious when my janked up UserName is also used as my display name. The right way to do logins right now on the Web is use email address as the login name and let the user choose their own display name which does not need to be unique. That's not ideal (email addresses can change) but it works pretty well. If you absolutely have to not use email as the login name, please at least let my login name have a space in it. While I'm delivering the news, here's something for you ignorant American backwoods motherfuckers. Some people's names have "special characters" in them. Like François Rabelais or Björk Guðmundsdóttir or 艾未未. It's 2011; the only software that can't handle Unicode properly is Perl. (As if you needed another reason not to use Perl.) Stop limiting your code; there are only two languages that can even be written in ASCII.
See also Elizabeth Zwicky on bad names
and this Perl rebuttal
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