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W-S just doesn't compute
Type in the hyphen in Winston-Salem on some Web sites, and you'll get an error message
Journal Photo Illustration by Richard Boyd II
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Published: June 8, 2008
Updated: 06/08/2008 01:45 am
If you live in Winston-Salem and you fill in the login form at Southwest.com, you'll get an error message.
"Please use your browser's BACK button to return to the previous page," the message says, "and then correct the following errors: *The City, ‘Winston-Salem', contains the invalid character(s): ‘-'
Say what? The hyphen is invalid? Hey, pal, Winston-Salem has had that hyphen in its name since 1913. You whippersnappers at Southwest have been in business only since 1967!
What's the deal?
A specialist in media relations at Southwest didn't understand the indignity. "Are you trying to buy a ticket?" she asked.
"I'm just trying to register with the Web site, and it won't let me because of my city's name," I explained.
She said she would look into it. She called back a few days later to explain that the software doesn't accept hyphens.
Yeah, I noticed.
In a digital world it appears that Winston-Salem simply doesn't compute.
Cities with hyphenated names already have a lot of obstacles to overcome. No, we're not just two towns joining forces to pretend to be a city. (Well, maybe we were in the past, but we've grown since then.) And no, we're not the Salem of "witch-trial" fame adding a prefix to hide our past.
We're Winston-Salem, and proud of it. And we dare not abbreviate it to "Winston," as many editors have learned when angry Salemites have complained about headlines.
We're also not alone. Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, and Soddy-Daisy, Tenn., are among our brethren in hyphenation.
But in the digital age, is that hyphen a hindrance?
Many online forms are instructed to only accept traditional letters when a word entry -- say, "City Name" -- is requested. People can't use special characters such as the hyphen. As a result, users get a rejection notice.
"Sounds like an unfortunate bug to me," said Ian Jacobs with the World Wild Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that suggests standards for the Web. But the standards suggested by the W3C are, as he put it, "hyphen-agnostic" -- meaning that they don't address the question of hyphens one way or the other.
"It is my understanding that form-control values are strings of unicode characters, which means they can be just about anything," he explained in an e-mail. "I have no idea why certain Web sites have built forms that restrict what characters city names can contain. Perhaps some sites are using a tool or library that has this limitation."
Mayor Allen Joines said that he has run into the problem.
"I've run across that … a couple of times when I was trying to buy something," he said. "I couldn't figure out what the problem was for a while. Finally, I realized just typing ‘Winston Salem' without the hyphen worked.
"I don't know if it's a huge problem right at the moment, but we'll certainly keep an eye on it."
The problem hasn't arisen up north in Wilkes-Barre, according to its mayor, Thomas M. Leighton.
Gayle Anderson, the president of the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, said that she has not heard any complaints about the hyphen being rejected on Web sites.
"We don't use the hyphen on our Web site (www.winstonsalem.com) because someone else has that hyphen in their domain name," she said. "It wasn't because we thought it would cause a problem."
Her suggestion for people who encounter a problem with the hyphenated name online:
"I would say just backspace and delete the hyphen and you'll be fine. And then maybe you can send a comment to the sites that tells them they're making you put the city name in incorrectly. But I don't think it'll make any difference."
But Jacobs is more optimistic about companies paying attention to user responses.
"Site owners may not realize they are keeping customers out and would probably welcome direct feedback," he said. "That would lead to fixes."
One easy solution to these problems would be for Winston-Salem to drop the hyphen, but don't look for that to happen.
"The hyphen means a lot to a lot of folks," Joines said. "It does symbolize the coming together of Winston and Salem in 1913."
"People don't like change," Anderson said, "and if there was a campaign (to drop the hyphen) my guess would be that people would get upset about it."
Plus, she said, "If they get rid of it, there goes my idea for the new name of the baseball team -- I thought we could be the ‘Hyphens' or the ‘Dash.'"
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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