I'm sorry, but 'ñ', apostrophes and accent marks are not forbidden, and no name should be ever 'invalid'. How can a name even be 'invalid'? Sometimes I think too many sites assume (wrongly) that all customers will be an average english-speaking, US-resident person.
Just if your language doesn't use it it doesn't mean it's still "just a shorthand."
PS. Thank you for reposting my comment comment in an earlier thread [0], but it's not that I've been flagged, I've been hellbanned [1]. This is how "hacker" news threats it contributing members with another perspective. And yes, I do know what I'm talking about, because I'm in China. But no, not Chinese. Enjoy the timewasting.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675395 [1] Turn showdead on, visit https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=uola
I don't believe ASCII or UTF preceded the creation of the written language.
Ñ existed long before USA, ASCII and UTF.
So nobody should think that today "Ñ" is a shorthand.
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(out of topic, just for moderators: hello mods, dang, why in the world is the user "uola" "hellbanned"? just because he posted too many responses? maybe he should have been informed to slow down, I know you have that feature. Is the reason is not to let know the "bots" or malicious users when the point of "too much" starts? Please ignore my question if it's inconvenient to answer, I just hope uola gets the chance to comment from some point in time later as I haven't seen anything bad in the dead comments.)
To be sorta on topic, I lived in many countries and I had to get used to people mangling my name in the most creative ways. As long as there is some form of ID or customer reference, I don't care.
But you seem to be missing the fact that "Gijs in 't Veld" is perfectly valid Ascii, as would be names like "O'Leary" or "O'Reilly" that are perhaps more common in the English-speaking world.
I wonder how well GP would take it if, say, the IRS webpay or DMV sites (or their equivalent wherever GP happens to live) balked at their name.
I wonder why that is. I guess part of the reason is that government doesn't need to invest heavily in UX because there is no threat of people going elsewhere – when you need a passport, you need a passport, and you're not going to order one from Amazon. In fact, there's probably a disincentive for government to continuously improve their UX precisely because any changes to a system that's in place and working well enough only cost them money.
Are there any counterexamples of government websites that offer good user experience?
On the other hand, the MA website where you pay things like unemployment insurance for your employees is terrible, complete with being offline outside of normal business hours (because afaict they take it offline while they do batch imports from physical media that companies send them). Note that this is not as much of a "voter-facing" website, of course. ;)
As a result, I know several people who have different names on their passport and their driver's license, simply because the computer system at the DMV is broken.
The original tweet, for example, reeked of crappy hand-crafted PHP code. Pretty much any web framework, even PHP ones, wrap bare exceptions like that into a proper 500 error with no information about the underlaying system. How long will it take for someone to put two and two together (MariaDB, no escaping of user input, a users table of some sort) and come up with a SQL injection that exposes all the password hashes for that website?
It shouldn't cost anything extra to use those symbols in a name. In fact, it should be cheaper, because they won't have to do checks on the input to determine if it's "valid". Just store and display the name using UTF-8 and be done with it.
No, sites don't have any obligation to serve everyone, but in the same way, potential customers have every right to criticize the site and it's poor implementation.