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North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

bbc.co.uk

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Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#121

Post by tsimionescu »

bombcar wrote: post #88
charlieo88 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with an apostrophe in my name, it has been my experience whenever I come across this sort of thing, you can be sure the project is crap.

Legally change your name to have \’ such as D\’Armond. That should break untold numbers of systems.

Lots of countries limit what you can name yourself. I very much doubt having a special apostrophe in your name can be a legal requirement.

Either way, apostrophes in names is quite uncommon in many parts of the world, and they are very likely to be ignored even on paper forms in those areas, if they are even allowed.

In general, each area has certain limits on what kinds of names if allows/understands, and it is up to the minority to adapt one way or another. It's very reasonable to want an Irish or maybe even British system to recognize a name like O'Reilly, but it's not really something you can expect of a Japanese system. Just as much as you shouldn't expect a name like 田中 to be recognized in France.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#122

Post by arrowsmith »

charlieo88 wrote: post #55
espinielli wrote: post #8

As if database were not able to del with apostrophes or other special characters... Yes you have to sanitize your queries, but you have to do it anyway. Client applications will of course have to be smarter

As someone with an apostrophe in my name, it has been my experience whenever I come across this sort of thing, you can be sure the project is crap.

It's like the stories of people with the last name "Null" who get errors when trying to enter their name into websites. If that's true then I don't want to think about how poorly built (and insecure) those systems must be.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#123

Post by zokier »

The implications are bizarre here. Only software/database impacted by this change is something custom for the city, anything more widely used must handle apostrophes etc anyways because other places have them too. And also this being a change now implies that whatever custom software in question is something new, because any old software must have been dealing with these street names with apostrophes.

So first question in my mind is what/why is this software that they are attempting to accommodate??? Or is this all just based on misinterpretation of the mentioned BS7666 and nobody thought to check it??

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#124

Post by tsimionescu »

rjh29 wrote: post #64
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some writers" say that the French Foreign Legion has been deployed to the front lines in Ukraine too. We must take this very seriously, then! Some writers write things like Four Fat Harvard Girls Lose Book Bag too. They use sentence fragments. They try to save ink by doing weird shit. Professional Buzzfeed writers write AF (yes, in caps) to mean as fuck. The Atlantic used the words electroöptical and rôles in 1940.…

Now you've provided an explanation I can see you're right (but downvoted). We would say Thomas-es in the possessive so it's written Thomas's.

It is easy to observe that this "rule" is false. Even though everyone pronounces it "thomases", some spell that "Thomas's", others spell it "Thomas'". It is a purely stylistic spelling difference, and both forms are in common use, in literate environments. So, there is no one rule about how this word is spelled. And since neither form reflects the pronunciation, both are purely conventional, they don't have a much deeper meaning to lean on.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#125

Post by nickdothutton »

yardstick wrote: post #106
nickdothutton wrote: post #102

How many hundreds or thousands of new streets are being created in North Yorkshire each year I wonder?

Existing street signs need replacement over time too.

They used to be made of cast iron, probably good for a couple of hundred years I’d image, unless smashed or stolen for scrap (sometimes this does happen). I wonder what they make them out of today that leads to needing frequent replacement.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#126

Post by harry_ord »

gumby wrote: post #91

This reminds me of the more extreme case of Spain changing the treatment of due to limitations of PCs in the 1990s. Our tools should adapt to the needs of humans, not the other way around!

Not really a problem but some buses and digital displays where I live in Austria skip umlauts and just use the 26 letter spelling ae rather than ä or strasse rather than Straße.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#127

Post by globular-toast »

calibas wrote: post #65

You can print apostrophes on a street sign without any database issues because a street sign doesn't interface directly with a database. At least not yet... All the technical issues here have already been solved a hundred times, there's plenty of other options. It's a little worrying that we're eliminating punctuation in real life because of issues with integrating with geographical databases.

Interestingly, the OpenStreetMap project considers road signage to be unquestionable "ground truth". If the sign changes, the map changes. We can't use any other database because that might not be available under a compatible licence.

Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

#129

Post by dboreham »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #47
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, the problem is always the underlying issue, even though the surface one is pretty ridiculous. If the council doesn't understand how to sanitise database input, imagine just how bad they are at the stuff that's mildly difficult or worse. Do NOT give any sensitive data to them, whatever you do!

I'm sure that IT working in the council understand input sanitisation and escape sequences, but they're working to a broken standard.

The standard isn't the point. You can have a "search key" or "standards compliant name" column in a table, and also have a "sign name" column. Whoever came up with this plan was either a fool or likes annoying people (possibly those two things are the same thing).
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