There is no default:’friend’ on the backend. This is a template language that basically takes a first name, returns the first word, replaces any special characters with ASCII equivalent ones (e.g., ö => o), title cases it, and if it’s blank it will return ‘friend’ instead of an empty string.
Some systems define a slug as the part of a URL that identifies a page in human-readable keywords. It is usually the end part of the URL (specifically of the path / pathinfo part), which can be interpreted as the name of the resource, similar to the basename in a filename or the title of a page. The name is based on the use of the word slug in the news media to indicate a short name given to an article for internal use.
I'm really learning a lot by posting this! Thats interesting for sure. I think I'm just more than happy my own career never involves me in this side of tech lol
that format would mangle so many names. my legal name is my middle name, so it would fail. my grandfather's first name was Jan Erik (with a space, it's still a single name), it would fail on that. i know a guy named Göran, it would fail on that (ö is not an accented o, it is a separate letter, but it will slugify to o due to browsers being browsers).
actually, come to think of it, wouldn't this also mangle the default due to 'friend' not being properly capitalized?