A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.
North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases.
The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.
Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked “everything going downhill”. They urged the authority to retain them.
Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe – such as the nearby St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it – infuriated her.
“I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation,” she said.
Though the updated St Mary’s sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was “brilliant”.
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North Yorkshire council said it was not the first to opt to “eliminate” the apostrophe from street signs. Cambridge city council had done the same, before it bowed to pressure and reinstated the apostrophe after complaints from campaigners.
There was also an outcry from residents when Mid Devon district council considered making it a policy to do away with apostrophes to “avoid potential confusion”.
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Interesting way to tell the world you’re vulnerable to SQL injection
youre
“This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (eg apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”
That sounds more like a pretty basic database design issue.
The database language is what it is. The application should be forming a well structured query to the database. Working around issues like this has been well established for a long time now. I’m guessing they have some bad software and for whatever reason they’re not addressing it correctly.
Sanitize your inputs or you get little Bobby Drop Tables enrolled in your city program again.
Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked “everything going downhill”.
They should be careful, some of those people sound pretty miffed. There could be muttering and grumbling going on.
Aren’t we supposed to have long outgrown the necessity of this?
Simply awful state of affair’s.
