Oh no it's not annoying !! I'm glad to have another set of eyes on it !! And it probably would be good to at least be able to inform people when they haven't hit the right buttons huh, although I still would rather just set a name for them. I think my big issue isn't so much worry that people will forget, more or less that there's a subset of readers who aren't interested in picking a name at all and would usually opt for a default.
I am initializing first and last name to be blank, but I did so with the intent of setting a name if the names had not been set using confirm, which circles us back around to "it only works for ONE of the variables for no particular reason". My prior idea to set a "default" name while initializing the variables and then allowing them to be overwritten with the confirm button yielded results though !! Not functioning results, but I'm finding that regardless of how first and last name are intialized, the javascript will always overwrite them with null value 0 if the confirm button isn't clicked. Even setting the value in the HTML is moot if the confirm buttons aren't clicked.
OH I JUST DID IT !! I made the (set:) on the subsequent page check for both a variable that was equal to zero and a variable that was completely unset. I think the reason for it only working for one or the other when I attempted one way or another is because I think the code is meant to serve one name box on one page, s I think one name was being set t value blank, or whatever value was in the HTML, and the other one wasn't being set at all.
Or, whatever. I'm going to upload that change, thanks for talking through it with me !!