Except that in some cultures names with illegal characters (depending on what you see as illegal) are on your passport. And some other cultures might not have passports.
The simplest reason is that not all names can be mapped to unicode.
Which for a lot of software don't matter as supporting non-unicode names is not worth it.
But if you are a government or some system used by one, or some other institution where you can't just randomly turn down some people from being registered in your computer system this is a potential problem.
Lastly there are systems which can contain fictive or historic names so じゃわØÆÅ?+ might very well be a name.
The only sane way to handle names is to handle them as opaque blobs which you display and maybe do a (fuzzy) search on but not much more.
Never _ever_ use names as any form of identificators in _any_ computer systems as they are both highly imprecise, unstable in time, unstable in context and unstable in interpretation.
(E.g. the same glyph sequences might be the same name or not depending on some historic context specific to the person using the name including weather or not the name is used in a way where it is "imported" into a culture, how people might have moved between cultural context in their live time and the live time of their ancestors and other factors. This is so extremely specific to the person using the name that there is absolutely no way to handle this (besides asking the person in question)).
There are also names which have no written form.
Also as far as I remember there are cases where there are multiple "forms" of the same character which theoretically should be purely cosmetic but over time the same name with some of it's characters in different forms has developed different "meanings" which for countries in which the "meaning" of a name matters is a relevant difference.
But as they normally don't mean anything different they have the same code point in unicode and (had when I read about it) no modifier to denote the differences either.
So while this names can somewhat be written they would have to be written in a form which can be seen as degraded by the person having the name and as such forcing them to do so might be seen as mean, impolite maybe even slightly insulting.
Sadly I don't have a reference to the article anymore. Also I don't remember the languages this appeared in but I think it was related to mandarin but I'm not completely sure.
Still the technical overhead of supporting non-unicode is massive and in general not worth it for nearly any application. Exceptions include historical use-cases cases and government use-cases. Also unicode strives to cover "all there is" so it might be "fixed" by now in some form or another.
For most companies I guess you would just ignore it as any alternative would be not worth it by a far shot.
For some special cases using the private use area(s) + a db storing images of the glyph + auto generating a font including glyph generated from the images could be one solution. Another would be to force people to change their names.
For other use cases (e.g. historic) storing a Unicode "approximation" of the name and a picture for the name (full or parts of it) can be a viable alternative, allowing you to generally just have Unicode but still store the information which was discarded when approximating the name in Unicode.
Also trying to extend Unicode can always be a option.
(Christian Orthodox, majority) Greeks don't name babies when born, only when baptized (usually during the first year, but could be later). Until then, they appear on formal documents as either "male"/"female" or as "AKO" ("no first name"). In practice, people either call a baby "the baby" or may sometimes use the (future) name informally.
My wife has a second middle name that you don’t usually see, not even on most official documents. But it is a part of her full legal name.
But lots of US websites and services don't like the "ë" in my name and tell me that it's an invalid character.
Yeah, seems like I have an illegal character on my passport, thanks for telling me.
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso : https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso
See ? First name ? Last name ? 2 components ? Uppercase ? Having faulty but tolerant systems does not mean they are right
5: Middle names are common but optional in the UK, I have one but my dad had two.
6: my full name, including middle name, is longer than the default space available in most paper forms which gives you separate box for each letter. String together any three 8-character first/middle/family names for same effect
7/8: In 2002, Richard James changed his name to “Mr Yellow-Rat Foxysquirrel Fairydiddle”, in exchange for a pint of beer.
9: Ἑλένη, نهاد وديع حداد, 蔡英文, ⴰⴳⵍⵍⵉⴷ ⵎⵓⵃⴰⵎⵎⴷ ⵙⴷⵉⵙ, …
10: Would الملك محمد السادس / ⴰⴳⵍⵍⵉⴷ ⵎⵓⵃⴰⵎⵎⴷ ⵙⴷⵉⵙ count? Or is this about mixing rather than having multiple variants for different character sets?
11/12/13: I don’t know how to even find examples
14: “-son” is a suffix?
15: “Number 16 Bus Shelter”, New Zealand: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/number-16-bus-shelter-violence...
16/17: same problem searching as 12/13
18: I need help with this one too
19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Abraham
20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person
21/22/23: Back in my first job, one guy called Mark Thompson had to collaborate with another guy in the same company also called Mark Thompson. Neither of these two was the Director General of the BBC, the author, the DJ, the newscaster, the reporter, the chemist, nor either the Arizona or Minnesota politicians.
24: China’s, what, 20% of world population now? Lots of rich Chinese people around, you probably do want to be able to support them.
25/26/27: likewise
28: probably has happened, given what people are like
29: Migration also happens (I am one)
30: I assume this is about going between character sets? In which case: is “Colin” transliterated as in the American (Colin Powell) or the British (Colin Firth)? Lossless has the same issue in the other direction, but it’s harder to give examples
31: Bad words for programming safety:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/136546161897747...
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
Rude surnames in English include: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicks_(surname)
32-36: I don’t know anything about this, beyond that it can happen surprisingly late
37: Chinese citizens living in America, with a Chinese state database entry with their actual name plus something in America that doesn’t support non-ASCII which has a crude attempt at a transliteration.
38: Depends what you mean by “well designed”. Starbucks’ coffee-writing is pretty infamous for the amusing errors, and that’s without even getting as far as bits.
Then you have the extra problem of the difference between the ü character (U+00FC) and u+(combining diaeresis (U+0308)).
39: wherever you’re from, most people are from elsewhere.
40: same problem as 11/12/13
It might be related to collation. Are ü and u sorted together? ß? Æ? Is Å its own letter?
Is it John Smith or Smith, John? Is there a Canonical Ordering?
Chinese seems to go by $FamilyName $GivenName as the "canonical order". French people do use the regular order but in some occasions do write it as FAMILYNAME GivenName
The EU also likes to do this, perhaps so HUNGARIAN Dude isn't called "Mr. Dude".
Which is what I think the original list is claiming.
Not only ordering but equality. So for example Müller and Mueller might be considered equal in German.
Edit: Just found an interesting example, Linkedin orders Á after Z (where the correct in most places would be to sort it together with A), after that, letters in different alphabets (correct) then the emoticons (well, people do add that to their names...)
Ordering also depends on the context. Usually "ä" is sorted like "a", but in lists of names it's sorted like "ae".
I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go about their life.
Also, who registers to a website, but doesn't have a name?
At some point you need to choose an identifier if you want to interact with other people or their services, and you might even need to conform your identifier to something that someone can comprehend and reproduce.
And at that point most of these falsehoods disappears.
Illegal characters? Yes, you can't write your name as じゃわØÆÅ?+ on your boarding pass. No, your name on your boarding pass won't match your name in your passport, because the name in your passport conforms to whatever writing system in use in the country of your passport and the boarding pass accepts only ASCII letters.
And airports still runs 24/7.