Regarding names, I've heard of two solutions that cover enough edge cases to be suitable:

1. Asking for "Given Name" and "Surname" clears up most issues with cultures like Korea (where surname comes first).

2. Simply have a "Name" field. Accept any Unicode characters. Hope for the best.

If someone has a name that cannot be represented in written characters or cannot be rendered in Unicode (which would be amazing, since Unicode covers ancient dead languages and fictional languages like Klingon) they probably have more pressing issues than trying to serialize their resume.

Mostly, people ask for firstname and lastname because they want to call you by one of them. you can avoid this problems by having a "Full name" and a "what do we call you": my full name is "Paul Biggar" but you should call me "Paul".

This solves some of the falsehoods programmers believe about names: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

Still not the silver bullet.

In Germany it's not really common to call people by their first name (IT is an exception), but I would hardly put "Mr. Lastname" into "what do we call you". It all depends on the context, even in the limited scope of a resume.

If they're just looking for something to say on the other end of the phone when you answer, isn't "Mr. Lastname" the appropriate thing to enter in that box?

No, it's not, because calling someones phone is also culturally dependent. Because in Germany, when you are calling someone, it is expected that person picking up the call will speak up first and introduce themself. Something like: "Herr Mustermann, hallo!".

You see, if you are calling person from Germany, knowing how to address him is not enough, you shall still know how to make a call. If you don't know that, you'll be rude anyways, and if you know that, you'll also know a proper way of addressing persons in different cultures.

"When a recruiter or employer contacts you, how would you like to be addressed?"

Is there really any further scope that should be covered? If there are specific cultural issues, shouldn't that be hammered out later?

Really, the design question for JSON Resume is "For what purpose is a name being provided?"

Here's another good reference on international names and ways to deal with names - http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

I agree with the names. Even just the ordering of first/last name can be difficult. I come from Korea where last name always comes before the first name in a formal setting.

Perhaps you should just require "full name" which the author of the resume would decide for him or herself.

Facebook takes a "family name" and a "given name", and asks you which order to display them, right?

Facebook also supports middle names too, though.

or, have both fields, which the author needs to fill in. This makes it easy to parse the data, but also makes it readable by humans, by separating it into different fields, for different purposes.