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Digital Photographic Arts

10 Years Ago

Is There Some Technical Reason We Can't Use Punctuation Marks In Our Titles?

Or is it just not done. I mean, a comma, or question mark might be nice to put into the title of a work of art.

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Chuck Staley

10 Years Ago

I agree that it is bothersome and, as Mary stated, this is an international site, isn't it?

 

Mary Bedy

10 Years Ago

That's odd, Wendy. I have two titles (that I can think of off the top of my head) that have had question marks in them for over a year. I know they didn't work when I first joined in 2010. I also have apostrophes in some, but commas and dashes don't work. Nor do accent marks. In fact, accent marks don't even work in keywords, which I would like because the foreign names of places, etc. are spelled wrong in my descriptions without the accent marks.

 

Wendy J St Christopher

10 Years Ago

My workaround is to use the 'real' title -- with proper punctuation, case, etc. -- as the first line of my description. That way, there's at least a chance of having the correct title seen and (hopefully) appreciated.

@Mary -- Interesting! I've never been able to make that happen. Though dashes/hyphens and apostrophes work okay.

 

Thanks for the responses guys.

 

Jim Vansant

10 Years Ago

I have worked around this somewhat by using a capitol "I" as a divider. I used to use a small "l" (ell) but Sean switched the header so all words begin with a capitol and my "l" became "L" and I had to go back and change all my titles that I had done this to. I don't know why he did this because standard titles don't start every word with a capitol-words like "the" and I don't think it would affect the google search. Jim Vansant

 

Jeffrey Kolker

10 Years Ago

I think it has to do with making the site as "Google friendly" as possible... but it would be nice, as sometimes the title NEEDS the punctuation or it won't make sense..or less sense.

 

Mary Bedy

10 Years Ago

You can use question marks - I have them in two titles.

 

Doug Srock

10 Years Ago

There is no creative programming on this site.

And the way he's rendering pages, dealing with Ascii conversion especially in URL's would not be "simple."
It would require additional code he is simply not using.

Plus, he's still coding the site to the HTML 4.01 standard.

It won't be long before the whole thing crashes in most browsers as unreadable and obsolete.

 

Jim Hughes

10 Years Ago

This bugs me too.

 

Bob Galka

10 Years Ago

As a programmer I can tell you that while technically true it is certainly easily overcome with a little creative programming. It is done everyday.. I think it is just not on the priority list of the programming staff here.

bob

 

Doug Srock

10 Years Ago

Because punctuation marks are not actual text. They are translated into their ASCII codes and most databases can't handle that easily.
Go look at: http://www.asciitable.com/

 

Deborah Smolinske

10 Years Ago

I don't know what kind of database software is used here on FAA, but most database software goes completely nuts when it sees punctuation marks because punctuation marks mean something different to a computer than they do to a human. I expect that's why we can't use them here.

 

Heather Applegate

10 Years Ago

It screws with the URL here... but I use them on every other site I've ever been on without a problem, so not sure why it's a problem here.

 

This discussion is closed.