from Hacker News

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

by IMSAI8080 on 5/5/24, 7:07 AM with 221 comments

  • by graypegg on 5/5/24, 4:12 PM

    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

  • by calibas on 5/5/24, 3:19 PM

    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.

  • by eigenket on 5/6/24, 9:06 AM

    I used to live in North Yorkshire until I moved away to start a job in mainland Europe.

    When I moved I tried to fill in the form on their website to indicate that I wouldn't be paying the council tax on the house I used to live in anymore. Weirdly I couldn't make the form work, it broke with weird errors about timing out. After some headscratching I decided (on a whim) to change my computer's timezone back to GMT and hilariously the form started working perfectly.

    Sadly I couldn't finish filling in the form, because it required a postcode for my new address, and would ONLY accept postcodes which matched the UK format (which my new address, in a different country obviously didn't match).

    You shouldn't be surprised about any IT insanity from North Yorkshire Council, they are impressively incompetent.

  • by resolutebat on 5/5/24, 9:55 AM

    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.

  • by kleton on 5/5/24, 6:47 PM

    Alternative solution: put the e back in that the apostrophe is standing in place of. St Maryes Place

  • by cykros on 5/5/24, 10:22 AM

    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...

  • by MarcScott on 5/5/24, 10:05 AM

    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.

  • by espinielli on 5/5/24, 9:14 AM

    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

  • by dudeinjapan on 5/5/24, 9:00 AM

    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.

  • by charles_f on 5/5/24, 3:26 PM

    Looks like a much easier solution than having a couple people learn how to escape a string and prepare a sql statement.

  • by robocat on 5/5/24, 7:52 AM

    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.

  • by AlecSchueler on 5/5/24, 9:13 AM

    I refuse to believe any standard considered fit for use in 2024 allows absolutely no special characters via escape sequences.

  • by fancyfredbot on 5/5/24, 10:48 AM

    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.

  • by dash2 on 5/6/24, 7:31 AM

    Airlines around the world, and many US-specific online forms, sternly refuse to accept that my surname is Hugh-Jones. So it becomes HughJones which makes me seem like a rogue robot.

  • by eesmith on 5/5/24, 9:09 AM

    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.)

  • by mavili on 5/6/24, 8:46 AM

    We cannot (competently) make computers work like we want them to, so let's change our lives to adapt to computers instead.

  • by IMSAI8080 on 5/5/24, 7:07 AM

    I live on Bobby Tables Close.

  • by Theodores on 5/5/24, 10:45 PM

    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.

  • by msla on 5/9/24, 1:30 PM

    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 naïve 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.

  • by none_to_remain on 5/5/24, 7:59 PM

    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.

  • by daveoc64 on 5/5/24, 9:38 AM

    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?

  • by zokier on 5/5/24, 8:48 PM

    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??

  • by achrono on 5/5/24, 9:53 PM

    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.

  • by gumby on 5/5/24, 5:49 PM

    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!

  • by lakomen on 5/5/24, 4:28 PM

    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.

  • by mihaaly on 5/6/24, 8:46 AM

    Wrapping the reality around computer ssytems that supposed to (and proclaim themselves so) solve any problem.

    Post office scandal about the inability to add numbers, a tiny line f uk the whole system, and we want to give your life into the hands of AI systems. What can go wrong?

  • by xjay on 5/5/24, 10:47 AM

    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

  • by dboreham on 5/5/24, 9:25 PM

    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".

  • by sambeau on 5/5/24, 9:18 AM

    So, I take it the UK now needs to rename Land's End and John o' Groats.

  • by notorandit on 5/6/24, 5:31 AM

    Base64 (or any other similar encoding) could be of help.

    But unrecoverably modifying the data to fit within constraints on input, storage or output seems a rather poor "solution".

  • by anotherevan on 5/5/24, 11:58 PM

    These discussions always remind me of the old adage that capitalisation is important because it means the different between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse…

  • by nickdothutton on 5/5/24, 7:28 PM

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

  • by dboreham on 5/5/24, 9:31 PM

    Before reading tfa I thought this was going to be about "Bar t'At Lane".

  • by penguin_booze on 5/6/24, 9:12 AM

    The Street of Saint Mary--that's what they should write instead.

  • by jmvoodoo on 5/5/24, 4:04 PM

    Tell me you're vulnerable to SQL injection without telling me you're vulnerable to SQL injection.

  • by DarkmSparks on 5/5/24, 10:32 AM

    Makes me wonder if this was the root cause of that software glitch that wrongly sent all those 1000s of postmasters to prison.

  • by webdoodle on 5/5/24, 3:14 PM

    Little Johny Drop Tables gets a bad rap every time.

  • by stevage on 5/5/24, 10:18 PM

    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.

  • by MezzoDelCammin on 5/5/24, 2:47 PM

    I can't believe nobody has yet mentioned the obligatory relevant XKCD:

    https://xkcd.com/327/

  • by GardenLetter27 on 5/5/24, 9:16 AM

    Makes sense IMO, the apostrophes don't add much but can cause a lot of issues in manual transcription, simple queries, etc.

  • by kwhitefoot on 5/5/24, 8:16 PM

    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?