If you give responsibility for street signage to local councils then you'll inevitably find that one of the hundreds of councils eventually does something dumb like this. The technical solution for this specific problem is readily available but the political solution seems more interesting/complicated.
North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
41–50 of 233 posts
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#42Replace it with a QR, but it contains a UUID which has to be used to look up the current street name. (If all you have is a phone, everything can be solved with an app.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
The Danish Address Register (DAR) assigns a UUID to everything in the addressing system - street names, postal codes, building addresses... It's a nice official database to have in Denmark but I don't know of any products that actually store the UUIDs in the database.
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
“The AGI now has a membership portal and it may be that the page you require sits within that portal. As a member you will be able to reach the page by logging in. If you are not yet a member of the AGI and are interested in joining please visit” If a standard isn’t publicly available under a free license it should not be called a standard.
While I agree with you, it's common that standards are not available without payment. For example, to get a copy of ISO 8601-1:2019 (as in, the date format standard!), it'll cost you $190. https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html
Or, my personal gripe, ISO 7816 - your everyday smartcard standard. A full copy sets you back > 2k €.
[1] https://www.vde-verlag.de/iec-normen/suchen/?publikationsnum...
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#44I refuse to believe any standard considered fit for use in 2024 allows absolutely no special characters via escape sequences.
Councils can barely afford standards fit for for use in 1994, unfortunately
Can't the government fund a single open standard? Every council is now individually paying to license this broken spec.
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#45Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#46So, no "O'Malley" or "O'Kelly" or "O'Brien" will ever be honored with a street name in North Yorkshire using their actual (Anglicized) name? This isn't a new issue. Around 1990 one of the computer labs at my school was run by someone with an Irish surname starting "O'", and I remember him complaining about software which couldn't handle his name. It's been 30 years, and there are still problems?!? (To say nothing of…
Doctor M’Benga
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#47Makes sense IMO, the apostrophes don't add much but can cause a lot of issues in manual transcription, simple queries, etc.
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.
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#48So, no "O'Malley" or "O'Kelly" or "O'Brien" will ever be honored with a street name in North Yorkshire using their actual (Anglicized) name? This isn't a new issue. Around 1990 one of the computer labs at my school was run by someone with an Irish surname starting "O'", and I remember him complaining about software which couldn't handle his name. It's been 30 years, and there are still problems?!? (To say nothing of…
Even among current and recent MPs and Lords, we've had: O’Brien (5), O’Donnell, O’Halloran, O’Hara (2), O’Mara, and O’Neill. https://members.parliament.uk/members/commons?SearchText=%27...
And if the "no punctuation" mandate were to be taken seriously, it would also affect innumerable hyphenated names.
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#49I have a street in a town near me which grammatically should be called St. Thomas' road. However, the street signs call it St. Thomas road at the north end and St. Thomas's road at the south end.
Thomas' is not grammatically correct in any version of English that I know. It's not plural. There is no special rule for that. Both the street signs you mentioned are at least grammatically coherent
Confidently wrong.
> Some writers and editors add ’s to every proper noun, be it Hastings’s or Jones’s. There also are a few who add only an apostrophe to all nouns ending in s.
> ..One method, common in newspapers and magazines, is to add an apostrophe plus s (’s) to common nouns ending in s, but only a stand-alone apostrophe to proper nouns ending in s.
> Examples: the class’s hours; Mr. Jones’ golf clubs; The canvas’s size; Texas’ weather
Re: North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thomas' is not grammatically correct in any version of English that I know. It's not plural. There is no special rule for that. Both the street signs you mentioned are at least grammatically coherent
When a word ends with an s, the use of an apostrophe without another s is valid English. Thomas’ and Thomas’s are the same thing.
I actually had to look this up, it depends if the possessive form is actually said with one or two Ss. For instance, it's Jones's and Bridges'.
https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/easy-learning/what-are... https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/apostrophe/...