DOCBOOK: Markup for personal names

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

I've had a long standing action item to write a new proposal for
"names and addresses". So I've been thinking about personal
names. Right now we have author, editor, etc. but there's clearly a
desire to markup other sorts of personal names (other sorts of
contributors) and to cleanup the association of names and addresses.

Rather than reinvent the wheel from scratch, I wonder if there are any
sources we could borrow from. Does anyone know of a good name markup
schema?

In the meantime, there are a few high-level issues we can discuss.

Our current design was influenced by the fact that we originally
viewed bibliographic markup as "raw" with the expectation that a
processor would generate all of the markup. We now have have "cooked"
forms that allow authors to put in the markup.

So one top-level question we could ask is, do we want

  <person><firstname>Norman</firstname><surname>Walsh</surname></person>

or something like

  <person>Norman Walsh</person>

I note that the latter form is the one that professional librarians
actually use because there are too many cultural traditions for a
reliable decomposition to be possible.

If we want the former form, how many of these forms do we want to be
able to support:

  Norman Walsh
  Norman ("Norm") Walsh
  Norm
  Mr. Walsh
  Norman D. Walsh

and from what markup?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | No matter how cynical I get, I
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | find I just can't keep up.--Lily
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | Tomlin