[HN Gopher] North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use ...
___________________________________________________________________
North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
Author : IMSAI8080
Score : 120 points
Date : 2024-05-05 07:07 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| I live on Bobby Tables Close.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| I live on Butts Wynd
| junto wrote:
| Do you live next to Seymour Butts?
| robjwells wrote:
| Help I'm Stuck In A Street Sign Factory Avenue
| robocat wrote:
| I can't find a public copy of the recent versions of BS7666. The
| 2006 version had zero instances of the word 'apostrophe' so not
| sure what they think they are referencing.
|
| BS 7666: 2006 is based upon an International Standard ISO 19112
| Spatial referencing by geographic identifiers.
| chgs wrote:
| "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.
| robjwells wrote:
| 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
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Or, my personal gripe, ISO 7816 - your everyday smartcard
| standard. A full copy sets you back > 2k EUR.
|
| [1] https://www.vde-verlag.de/iec-
| normen/suchen/?publikationsnum...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Also on Anna's Archive:
|
| https://annas-
| archive.org/md5/7957d8af6f296b3adaafd5c21d4aa3...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Just get it from Anna's Archive
|
| https://annas-
| archive.org/md5/6b38669dbfb1042a40be0f804258fd...
|
| And upload anything you think is important enough to
| Library Genesis
|
| https://wiki.mhut.org/content:how_to_upload
| zenlambda wrote:
| There are guidelines for street gazeteers here:
|
| https://www.agi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BS7666Guid...
|
| _4.4.1 Street names The designated street name is usually to
| be found on the name plate on the street. However, these may
| not always be correct, and may differ between the ends of the
| street. Unofficial street names are ones that have not been
| adopted by the appropriate Highways Authority but may be in
| common usage, e.g. "The Great North Road". Street names,
| whether designated or unofficial, should be recorded in full.
| Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used unless they
| appear in the designated name, e.g. "Dr Newton's Way". Only
| single spaces should be used._
|
| So I think all its saying gazetteer editors should not add
| punctuation if its "missing" from the designated place name.
|
| Punctuation is fine if it already part of the place name.
|
| I think the intention is to preserve the original place name.
|
| So the council is wrong to blame the specification.
| orra wrote:
| Interesting! However the company which runs the official
| gazetteer has advice, and the reasoning is nonsense:
|
| >GeoPlace does not advise that councils include or remove
| punctuation in official naming or on the street name plate.
| Street naming and numbering is a council policy decision.
|
| >However, the Data Entry Conventions documentation does state
| that GeoPlace would prefer not receive data (including street
| names) with punctuation.
|
| >This is for two main reasons:
|
| > machine readability - punctuation can be misinterpreted by
| computers
|
| > usability - for example, if loaded into say an emergency
| service command and control system and a caller provides a
| street name, the search will be faster if the search is
| entered and returned without punctuation.
|
| https://www.geoplace.co.uk/street-naming-and-
| numbering/guida...
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| The best part of this article is:
|
| Ruby Wang... did not mind the changes. "To be honest with you,
| because I'm not from this country it doesn't matter because it's
| the same pronunciation," she added.
| mrcartmeneses wrote:
| And then the photo of her looks exactly like my wife when she
| doesn't give a shit about my bullshit
| grajaganDev wrote:
| This could be from The Onion.
| eesmith wrote:
| So, 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 "Madeleine L'Engle" or any of many others with
| an apostrophe in their name.)
| robjwells wrote:
| 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...
| microtherion wrote:
| And if the "no punctuation" mandate were to be taken
| seriously, it would also affect innumerable hyphenated names.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Doctor M'Benga
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I refuse to believe any standard considered fit for use in 2024
| allows absolutely no special characters via escape sequences.
| switch007 wrote:
| Councils can barely afford standards fit for for use in 1994,
| unfortunately
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Can't the government fund a single open standard? Every
| council is now individually paying to license this broken
| spec.
| edent wrote:
| You can make that suggestion at https://github.com/co-
| cddo/open-standards
|
| That's the UK Government's discussion space for adopting
| open standards.
|
| (I used to work there.)
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Thanks, I will do!
|
| I'm a big fan of the UK government's commitments to open
| standards and their whole IT philosophy in general.
|
| That said local councils usually give me quite the
| opposite feeling. I will definitely look into your
| suggestion in the hope of seeing some trickle-down!
| espinielli wrote:
| 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
| ginko wrote:
| I think part of the problem with apostrophes is also that
| there's two characters for it. ' and '
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| The Hawai`ian `okina symbol begs to differ...
| chrisjj wrote:
| And now they've added the problem of some roads having two
| names. Such as the example in the article's first photo.
| dark-star wrote:
| My keyboard has at least 3 already: ` ' and ' ...
|
| I guess there are lots more in other languages...
| filmor wrote:
| The first two are accents, and to me it always looks
| extremely unprofessional when they are abused as
| apostrophes.
| vundercind wrote:
| Right single quote is not less-correct than the neutral
| character.
| secondcoming wrote:
| There's not though. My iPad gives this one, but that's
| probably the fault of Apple thinking they know better.
| refset wrote:
| H2 offers quite a comprehensive solution for dealing with this:
|
| > [H2] provides a way to enforce usage of parameters when
| passing user input to the database. This is done by disabling
| embedded literals in SQL statements. To do this, execute the
| statement:
|
| > SET ALLOW_LITERALS NONE;
|
| > Literals can only be enabled or disabled by an administrator
|
| https://www.h2database.com/html/advanced.html
| charlieo88 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Legally change your name to have \' such as D\'Armond.
|
| That should break untold numbers of systems.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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 Tian Zhong to be recognized in France.
| bombcar wrote:
| This results in amusing side-effects, like buying a house
| requiring you to sign every variation of your name that
| the credit check found, but it can also get you multiple
| "one per person" signup options, so there's that, too.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| 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.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I would argue if you sanitize your input you are already doing
| it wrong, you should parameterize queries and send the data
| entirely separately from code.
| swasheck wrote:
| from a certain perspective, parameterization could be seen as
| sanitation, no?
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| If it sanitizes anything, parameterization sanitizes the
| code, not the data, and has much lower impact on the
| outside world (because the rest of the world isn't
| pressured to rename things in the real world to fit
| arbitrary constraints in the computer).
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Makes sense IMO, the apostrophes don't add much but can cause a
| lot of issues in manual transcription, simple queries, etc.
| magnio wrote:
| *dont
| logifail wrote:
| next to go will be capital letters
|
| thenspaces
| OJFord wrote:
| y not i fink sum ppl do that already in sum context nyway
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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!
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| It's not just queries though - but CSV exports, etc. - every
| single system that ever handles this data needs to handle
| them.
|
| Searching if users omit the apostrophes, etc.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I'm sure that IT working in the council understand input
| sanitisation and escape sequences, but they're working to a
| broken standard.
| mateo1 wrote:
| And/or this is #145 on their to-do list, so after a good 15
| months of postponing it, an overworked IT council guy told
| his supervisor "if you want X implemented without
| overhauling system Y just get rid of apostrophes" so this
| article happened.
| dboreham wrote:
| 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).
| janice1999 wrote:
| Aside from making some signs grammatically incorrect, it means
| places/streets cannot be named after anyone with an apostrophe
| in their name without mangling their name. It's a bit ironic to
| honour people by failing to respect their name.
| sambeau wrote:
| So, I take it the UK now needs to rename Land's End and John o'
| Groats.
| justincormack wrote:
| Not to mention Westward Ho!.
| OJFord wrote:
| Only if they get somewhere moved to North Yorkshire.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| I don't really understand why they've decided to do this in 2024.
|
| We all know that older systems had problems with encoding and
| escaping special characters, but wouldn't they have encountered
| and dealt with all the possible problems by now?
| resolutebat wrote:
| Australia removed apostrophes from all official place names back
| in 1966, leading to names like Surfers Paradise, Princes Highway
| and Wisemans Ferry. Given the date, I doubt computing was a major
| consideration though.
| MarcScott wrote:
| I 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.
| dark-star wrote:
| I would say that on average, the street name is correct ;-)
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| 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
| oarsinsync wrote:
| 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.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| lol no. arguably the word ain't is more proper English than
| Chris' or boss'
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Lol yes though?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It is trivial to find more than sufficiently
| authoritative source that cover the rules that make
| "Chris'" and "boss'" perfectly value contracted
| possessives in English. [1]
|
| However, it's English: there isn't just _one rule_ ,
| another rule can _also_ be valid and might be the one you
| 're familiar with on a day to day basis. That doesn't
| mean any other way to say or write the same thing is
| wrong, it's just a pattern you never saw. Like someone
| going "lol snuck isn't a real word, it's sneaked!" and
| then you hand them a dictionary and they learn something
| new about their own language.
|
| [1] https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/media_wysiwyg
| /Univer...
| swores wrote:
| Being confident doesn't change the fact that you're
| misinformed about English grammar.
| vundercind wrote:
| You pronounce both of your examples with two S phonemes
| at the end. Putting that in the written form is
| absolutely Ok.
| Caligatio wrote:
| 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/apo
| strophe/...
| lioeters wrote:
| 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
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| "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 electrooptical and roles in 1940. Just because
| some minimum-wage burnout or penny-pinching editor breaks a
| rule doesn't mean that the rule doesn't exist.
|
| If you go around the office saying that someone drank out
| of the boss' mug, they'll think you're fresh off the boat.
| Not only is it wrong in written English, it's not even
| accepted colloquially in spoken English, anywhere. And so
| it makes perfect sense that the written form would reflect
| the pronunciation.
|
| Saying Texas' weather out loud just confuses people into
| thinking you're using it as an adjective when what you're
| really doing is trying to sound smart when you're actually
| sounding dumb. If you point at a book and say, that's
| Chris', you sound like you have brain damage. How is the
| book Chris'? Chris is a person, not a book! The only reason
| that people don't correct you is that they're being polite.
| And people misspell words all the time and the world
| doesn't cave in. That doesn't imply any particular thing
| about English grammar.
|
| Another commenter found that you can say Jeff Bridges'
| because this is an irregular case to avoid saying the same
| sound twice--an exception which proves the rule (and also,
| I don't think it's irrelevant at all to point out the fact
| that Bridges is literally a plural noun made into a name).
| _But Thomas is decidedly not in this narrow category. His
| source even uses Thomas ' as an example of what not to do_,
| lol. Normally I wouldn't dumpster someone this hard but hn
| rate limits so I may as well lengthen my response. Nothing
| personal.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > it's not even accepted colloquially in spoken English
|
| How the hell would you hear the apostrophe in "spoken
| English"?
| Strang wrote:
| That's exactly his point. You don't hear the apostrophe
| but you do hear the "s," meaning that Thomas and Thomas'
| cannot be distinguished. And so Thomas's must be used
| instead.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The spoken and written language are not the same thing.
| Even if you say "Thomas's," sources disagree on whether
| you write "Thomas's" or "Thomas'", because the latter is
| more consistent with the rules for other ends-in-s words
| and, therefore, easier to remember.
|
| (My personal prediction: give it 100 to 200 years and
| we're going to drop the trailing 's' in all these cases.
| "Cat'" will just be pronounced "cats" and understood to
| mean "an adjective indicating the noun is owned by the
| cat").
| secondcoming wrote:
| Thomas' is pronounced the same as Thomas's.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| As the OP said, "Thomas'" is pronounced "Thomases".
|
| "Thomas's" means "belongs to Thomas". Pronounced the
| same, but spelled differently, because it is a different
| word.
| rjh29 wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Rules, especially in English, are not grounded in any
| agreed-upon authority and never have been, tracing all
| the way back to Chaucer more-or-less codifying the
| written form of the language by simply _writing one
| story_ that then became the most popular English printed
| work for a generation.
|
| Try not to lean too hard on how other people use the
| language just because it ain't how you use it. Makes you
| look outta touch with the way folks are playin' around
| with one of our shared human comms protocols, neh?
|
| > but hn rate limits
|
| Not in general. Only if you've proven yourself to be a
| poster for whom the mods think that rate-limiting you
| improves the health of the discourse 'round these parts.
|
| Being someone who is also rate-limited. ;)
| secondcoming wrote:
| You're wrong. It's definitely correct, but even native
| English speakers get the Rules of Apostrophe wrong all the
| time.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's an older rule that's falling out of style, but it is
| real. Until 2017 Thomas' was correct by the Associated Press
| stylebook.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| I do like Thomas'(r) English Muffins though.
| nullhole wrote:
| Not quite related to apostrophes, but I feel the need to point
| out my favourite street name of all time (as read on a street
| sign): St John St (-> Saint John Street)
| cykros wrote:
| This seems silly for the reason they're doing it, in that a
| modern database should be able to handle characters with a little
| sanitation.
|
| However, it does seem like it could be helpful when it comes to
| satnav applications to remove ambiguity. Google's going to
| autocorrect most of the time anyway, but this way, you're less
| likely to run into an issue where it takes you to Kings Landing
| in the wrong town because you didn't type King's Landing in the
| town you meant.
|
| Sure, they tell you what town you're looking at, but I can't be
| the only one who's quickly typed in a destination and didn't take
| the time to double check and ended up driving to the wrong
| location for something. For some reason all of the hockey rinks
| near me have almost identical names...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| "This seems silly" is the nicest way to describe government
| standards that were already outdated in the 90's
| thfuran wrote:
| >but this way, you're less likely to run into an issue where it
| takes you to Kings Landing in the wrong town because you didn't
| type King's Landing in the town you meant.
|
| That's pretty uncompelling. Should we also get rid of the
| letter s to avoid mix-ups between Kings Landing and King
| Landing?
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| Makes me wonder if this was the root cause of that software
| glitch that wrongly sent all those 1000s of postmasters to
| prison.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Different issue. In that case, the vendor had given some
| guarantees of consistency of data across network nodes that the
| network didn't actually support. Because there were guarantees,
| the law went looking for horses instead of zebras, and the
| "horses" in this case were that only a few people had admin
| rights to mess with the transactions and the audit logs.
|
| ... but in reality, no human was messing with those; system
| bugs were dropping or duplicating data. The government should
| not have trusted claims of a third-party without independent
| auditing they controlled (and, ultimately, I think that's the
| takeaway that all governments should be taking from this
| disaster).
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| dropping and duplicating data is exactly the symptom you get
| from not sanitising aprostrophies in your data correctly.
| xjay wrote:
| Replace 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
| rav wrote:
| 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.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| 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.
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| I can't believe nobody has yet mentioned the obligatory relevant
| XKCD:
|
| https://xkcd.com/327/
| webdoodle wrote:
| Little Johny Drop Tables gets a bad rap every time.
| calibas wrote:
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| Apparently, this is because of a standard they're required to
| conform to, not database software in specific:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265929
|
| > As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific
| database itself, but the standard they are required to record
| geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as
| "BS 7666".
|
| On the other hand, you're naive if you think English hasn't
| already been simplified to fit on machinery such as typewriters
| and cheap printing presses. This process began long before
| computers.
| eesmith wrote:
| The Linotype machine supported fl, ff, ffi, , oe, and ae. See
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Linotype.
| .. linked to from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine. Or see https:
| //archive.org/details/LinotypeKeyboardPractice/page/n9... .
|
| Even cheap printing presses could handle more than you think.
| Here's a type case layout from 1846, again with ae, oe, fl,
| ff, and ffi, fi and ffl. https://archive.org/details/printing
| apparatu00holtrich/page/... .
|
| That book is for the "Parlour printing press [which] was
| invented by Mr. Cowper for the amusement and education of
| youth, by enabling them to print any little subject they had
| previously written, provided the printing did not exceed in
| size the dimensions of an ordinary duodecimo page, which
| measures about 5 inches by 3 inches."
| calibas wrote:
| With the printing press it makes sense, there's physical
| constraints that make things very difficult if you want to
| support a huge number of different characters. Those
| limitations don't exist anymore though.
|
| On one hand we have systems supporting Unicode and just about
| every character imaginable, it's an example of using
| technology to go beyond the limitations of the past. You
| could have a system that supports emojis on street signs, but
| instead we're going the opposite direction and introducing
| artificial limitations that are even more restrictive than
| 500 year-old technology.
| bmitc wrote:
| It seems like it is yet another example of software not written
| to requirements so now the requirements are adjusted to fit the
| software implementation.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I haven't checked but how do they handle streets if the signs
| have two different spellings? There was a street growing up
| that was spelled two different ways and I still don't know
| what the right one was!
| charles_f wrote:
| Looks like a much easier solution than having a couple people
| learn how to escape a string and prepare a sql statement.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| My local (US) county has a web service to look up property
| deeds and titles.
|
| They "solved" this problem by just having you enter the street
| name with no punctuation or suffix (ave, st, etc), and if there
| is a collision the form pops out a drop-down selector to have
| you disambiguate.
|
| It's not the cleanest solution but it works. I agree that
| bending the humans to serve the needs of the machine feels...
| Sub-optimal.
| amluto wrote:
| To be fair, a degree of fuzziness in matching is quite
| valuable. Is it Eighth Ave, 8th Ave, Eighth Avenue or 8th
| Avenue? Or W 8th Ave, perhaps? Is that deed for Unit 7 or Apt
| 7 or #7 or Ste 7? Is the street address 15 8th Ave or 015 8th
| Ave? In cases where one zip code spans multiple cities,
| should anyone really be matching on the city? How about
| communities in a city in which no one is quite sure what goes
| in the city field? (Is "Pacific Palisades, CA" a valid
| city+state? How about Van Nuys, CA or Hollywood, CA? But
| don't confuse this situation with West Hollywood, CA or
| Beverly Hills, CA, which are actual cities.)
|
| I wonder what address verification services expect for the
| "numbers in the address" when the address is 123 1/2 4th Ave
| #5".
|
| Apostrophes seem like the least of anyone's concerns.
| msla wrote:
| For the American case, the USPS has a free API to do address
| validation and standardization.
|
| USPS APIs in general:
|
| https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/#dev
|
| https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-
| apis/documentation-u...
|
| The specific API:
|
| https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/address-
| informa...
| jmvoodoo wrote:
| Tell me you're vulnerable to SQL injection without telling me
| you're vulnerable to SQL injection.
| graypegg wrote:
| As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific
| database itself, but the standard they are required to record
| geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as "BS
| 7666".
|
| https://www.agi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BS7666Guid...
| # Standard data types used in BS 7666 CharacterString: a
| sequence of alphanumeric characters ...
|
| If I had to guess, alphanumeric is interpreted as [0-9a-z].
|
| The sign printer probably expects this format when printing signs
| for the government, or worse, has a contract that says the
| government must provide this standard format for the sign
| information.
|
| So it's just a government mandated database schema... I don't
| think that's any better of a reasoning though lol
| devsda wrote:
| BS in "BS 7666" stands for British Standard and not anything
| else.
|
| If the standard restricts street names to those certain
| characters, may be it really is _BS_.
| colloydi wrote:
| The '666' portion doesn't inspire confidence either.
|
| We love apostrophes so much we have them on our supermarkets.
| If they're not there we add them.
|
| e.g. I'm going to Sainbury's
|
| e.g. I'm going to Tesco's
|
| ...despite the fact that it's real name is plain old Tesco.
| swores wrote:
| That's because you're not going to Tesco the registered
| company, you're going to (one of) Tesco's (shops). It's
| just traditional and logical grammar, not misnaming.
| colloydi wrote:
| Thank you, I'll remember that next time I pay a visit to
| Sainbury's's!
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This is not true. We don't apply this "rule" to any other
| establishment, e.g. people don't say "I'm going to Burger
| King's" or "I'm going to Costa's".
|
| There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just _wrong_. It
| 's not the name of the business.
| DougBTX wrote:
| Such a strict interpretation would also exclude spaces.
| adolph wrote:
| at least over there something would probably "isle of pen"
| rather than "pen island"
| ericjmorey wrote:
| The Council is making the same mistake you are:
|
| > How to use these standards > > The UPRN and USRN standards
| form a machine-readable addition to an address or street record
| held in a system. When using UPRNs and USRNs you can continue
| to use existing formats but add a field for these identifiers.
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-fo...
| lakomen wrote:
| Just yesterday I generated a 64 char length mysql password, which
| had \ and ` and '. I couldn't properly escape it, to pass via
| argv, so I had to truncate it and remove all those symbols.
|
| So I thought, how can this problem be solved? IMHO by doing a hex
| representation 0x00-0xFF per char. That would also increase
| entropy.
|
| MySQL and other databases would need to support hex input of
| passwords, also setting of hex passwords via SQL.
| Izkata wrote:
| MySQL at least should support that last bit (it has hex
| strings, and passwords are set with strings using SQL), but not
| the first as far as I know.
| gumby wrote:
| This reminds me of the more extreme case of Spain changing the
| treatment of <ll> due to limitations of PCs in the 1990s.
|
| Our tools should adapt to the needs of humans, not the other way
| around!
| landhar wrote:
| Do you have pointers to this? As a Spaniard I recall that even
| though I was originally told the spanish alphabet treated the
| LL as its own letter, it always felt quite inconsistent. And I
| always assumed it's removal was more about simplifying things
| than having to do with computers
| gumby wrote:
| There is a comment from "adolph" parallel to yours with
| footnotes. But I remember the event well (though it was 30
| years ago) as the difficulty for programmers was given as the
| justification for the law (this was a change in collation).
|
| This particularly irked me as unicode was a few years old at
| this point, and while not really adopted yet, was clearly the
| future.
| knodi123 wrote:
| The other day (in 2024!!) , I got a message saying my password
| needed to include a special character, with a helpful list of
| special characters that were forbidden.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Hmm... However, language is itself also a tool. There are cases
| where adapting language to another tool is easier than the
| other way around.
| gumby wrote:
| Sure, but the computer is a tool designed to be malleable and
| adapt to the human. This kind of grunt work (adapting to
| humans' models of collation) is exactly the kind of task that
| should be handed off to machines.
| adolph wrote:
| _The digraphs ch (named che), ll (named elle or doble ele) have
| traditionally also been treated as letters of the alphabet,
| since 1803. However, in 1994, the tenth congress of the
| Association of Spanish Language Academies agreed to alphabetize
| ch and ll as ordinary pairs of letters in the dictionary by
| request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while
| keeping them as distinct letters for the alphabet and other
| purposes. In 2010 the Spanish Language Academies agreed that
| these two digraphs were not separate letters. Similarly, rr
| (named erre or ere) has sometimes been considered a separate
| letter but is no longer._
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Spanish_alphabet
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150426001803/https://www.nytim...
| harry_ord wrote:
| 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 a or strasse rather than Strasse.
| kleton wrote:
| Alternative solution: put the e back in that the apostrophe is
| standing in place of. St Maryes Place
| nickdothutton wrote:
| How many hundreds or thousands of new streets are being created
| in North Yorkshire each year I wonder?
| yardstick wrote:
| Existing street signs need replacement over time too.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| 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.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| There is a public recreation facility called Peter'?s Field in
| NYC.
|
| It is named primarily for Peter Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper (NYC
| historical notables), secondarily for Peter Piper, Peter Parker,
| Peter Pan, Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, Peter Rabbit, and Peter
| from "Peter and the Wolf".
|
| Seems they use Peters Field and Peter's Field but not Peters'
| Field.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It's been common though not exclusive practice to not use
| apostrophes in street names for a very long time in the south of
| England, is Yorkshire just catching up?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I can provide pictures in evidence if the down voter needs it.
| zokier wrote:
| 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??
| dboreham wrote:
| I'm going to guess this is going to be one of those stories that
| ends with "and that person is an idiot". And "there was nobody
| with a clue present to tell them they're obviously an idiot".
| dboreham wrote:
| Before reading tfa I thought this was going to be about "Bar t'At
| Lane".
| achrono wrote:
| Next: due to an issue with primary key mapping, all cities in the
| US are now required to have a unique name, so all affected cities
| must work together to come up with new names. Start with the
| Springfields.
| stevage wrote:
| There might be good reasons for not printing them on signs, but
| this reason seems dumb.
|
| Around here (Melbourne, Australia) I don't think they are ever
| used. "Princes St" etc. It's fine.
| Theodores wrote:
| In the UK, if you venture from a side street to a main road, the
| chances are that there won't be a sign to tell you what that main
| road is, unless you venture down that main road to where it meets
| another main road. This can be a considerable distance.
|
| I am all for keeping in the apostrophes as they are mini
| 'flashcards' to help the youngsters learn the value of
| punctuation. I also think that it is out of respect for
| residents, if I was on 'St. Mary's Road' and I had to write 'st
| marys rd' then I would worry that people outside Yorkshire might
| think I was illiterate.
|
| One day a UK county will do an excellent job of signs, so people
| always know where they are without SatNav. Remember that many
| signs were removed just in case the Germans arrived, and we
| couldn't have them finding their way around, could we?
|
| North Yorkshire council could trial some best practice signage
| that involves having actual signs instead of making the
| punctuation vanish. They could get an unexpected tourism boost
| from doing so with mildly fewer cars on the roads.
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