No conventions are needed because a Feature Table can point, via its FeatureParams field, at a specific name ID. See the feature tag registry which also mentions which name IDs may be used.

Okay, so given an FDK code snippet like below, will the FeatureParams field that you mentioned automatically point to the right name ID, given that in this code I don’t even point out name IDs?
In other words: Is this all code that is necessary?


feature ss04 {
# Stylistic Set 4
featureNames {
name 1 "Alternate german lowercase sz";
name 3 "Alternate german lowercase sz";
};
}ss04;


It is as simple as that.

Does anyone have any info on what applications display these name records in the UI?

I don't know of any that do, yet. Certainly not InDesign or the like. Anybody else know of one that does?

Maybe in the [near] future; there is one Adobe font with human readable names: Source Sans Pro

I would not assume any correlation between the data being in Adobe fonts and support in Adobe applications. Adobe has had optical size data in OpenType fonts for over a decade now, and it is still unsupported by any Adobe application.