In some cultures a signature is somewhat like a signat-ring, a written emblem not necessarily related to alphabetic sequences. An 'X' for instance, signed on a contract by an illiterate and countersigned by a witness (well that was alphabetic but you get the idea). I knew a fellow from Bangalore who's signature was a graphic, some symbol written above a line and some letters below the line.

I'm told the squiggle is actually better than a legible signature. The legible signature is something you were trained to do following rules, and thus can be forged by someone else following the same rules. The squiggle is you, and so the existence/absence of some loop is enough to show a forgery and thus a forger has to memorize the entire thing with no rules to help.

I'm not qualified to state if the above is true, but I like to believe it is.

In Japan some places require me to sign my name with the exact same way than it's written in my passport using block letters. Normally I'd just write a cursive, stylized version (without my middle name).

Some other names allow stylized signatures, but then they require that the signature must be almost exactly the same every time I write it. Again, not something I'm used to.

This, of course reflects the fact that the Japanese don't use signatures to sign contracts. They use personal name stamps. The requirements make sense if you think your signature as a "name stamp that's written manually".

Of course, signatures are not names, they have extra cultural, societal and legal baggage, but... just a data point that might be interesting.

There was a minor kerfuffle a few years ago because Obama was considering someone for Secretary of Treasury whose signature (which would have appeared on all American bills) was just five or six loops. It bore no resemblance to his name. He just apparently decided that was going to be his signature, and that's what he used for most of this adult life.

I have really terrible handwriting, whenever I sign a document it literally is just some random continuous line. It's never been an issue. Nobody seems to care. You could probably make a smiley face and never have an issue regardless of the importance of the document.

The DICOM standard has rather more to say about names than that:

A character string encoded using a 5 component convention. The character code 5CH (the BACKSLASH "\" in ISO-IR 6) shall not be present, as it is used as the delimiter between values in multiple valued data elements. The string may be padded with trailing spaces. For human use, the five components in their order of occurrence are: family name complex, given name complex, middle name, name prefix, name suffix.

Any of the five components may be an empty string. The component delimiter shall be the caret "^" character (5EH). Delimiters are required for interior null components. Trailing null components and their delimiters may be omitted. Multiple entries are permitted in each component and are encoded as natural text strings, in the format preferred by the named person.

For veterinary use, the first two of the five components in their order of occurrence are: responsible party family name or responsible organization name, patient name. The remaining components are not used and shall not be present.

This group of five components is referred to as a Person Name component group.

For the purpose of writing names in ideographic characters and in phonetic characters, up to 3 groups of components (see Annexes H, I and J) may be used. The delimiter for component groups shall be the equals character "=" (3DH). The three component groups of components in their order of occurrence are: an alphabetic representation, an ideographic representation, and a phonetic representation.

Any component group may be absent, including the first component group. In this case, the person name may start with one or more "=" delimiters. Delimiters are required for interior null component groups. Trailing null component groups and their delimiters may be omitted.

Precise semantics are defined for each component group. See Section 6.2.1.2.

For examples and notes, see Section 6.2.1.1.

Ah! So, are you saying that it's actually not "yep, all the data fit", but "that which doesn't fit will be made to, by force if necessary"? Yup, that's what I am saying: let's just design this in a lazy way and pretend.

It depends which healthcare system you're dealing with. Legacy systems often have severe limitations. The more modern HL7 CDA R2 data interchange standard has an extremely flexible model for names which can properly accommodate the majority of "falsehoods".