N Yorkshire have banned apostrophes from their street names, saying
A spokesperson from North Yorkshire council added: “All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.
“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.”
Paragraph 1 is a simple
LIE, BS7666 says nothing of the sort, and in fact all its examples have apostrophes in them. "Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used unless they appear in the designated name (e.g. ‘Earl’s Court Road’)."
Paragraph 2 makes my blood boil: if you're a programmer and you can't make your interface to the database work properly taking account of characters that have special meanings to your system, then you simply shouldn't be in your job. Changing the data to make your job easier is never the right answer.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/05/north-yorkshires-dropped-apostrophe-for-street-signs-upsets-residents
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