Vancouver man says institutions unable to recognize new Indigenous street name
Vancouver man says institutions unable to recognize new Indigenous street name - BC | Globalnews.ca
cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/217784
Signposts on the Vancouver street bear the English name below the official Musqueam name, which is written in the North American Phonetic Alphabet.
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I found this interesting since it's basically about unicode support, so I did some research. This article seems bullshit, it seems like rhe residents are expected to use the english version of the streetname (Musqueamview) and not the indigenous one with uncommon letters. So, the problems described is totally fabricated. But also: databases shouldn't forbid uncommon unicode letters if it isn't called for.
Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level's yacht funds, so it won't happen. These are the people who when faced with the "pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap" will never pick the first one.
Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet's A-Z, you're out of luck. They'll give you an approximation you don't want and you'll like it. Lower case? What's that? You're Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? Fk you, that's in the bin, you're OBRIEN now.
I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it's 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.
Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen.
Even so, multiple strategies to include unicode characters in ASCII exist. sigh
Putting it in a DB is the easy part.
It’s support in a thousand other systems that deal with addresses that’s the real problem.
For something like a street address, interoperability is a hell of a lot more important than culturally preferred spelling.
More than three syllables, too complicated for the average American.
But also: databases shouldn't forbid uncommon unicode letters if it isn't called for.
I stumble across this issue quite often. When you fill out a form for US customs, you are both required to provide exact data and you are only allowed a-z, 0-9, and some punctuation. That you cannot fulfil both because they are mutually exclusive does not cross their blessed little minds.
