What would prevent a website from not allowing special characters when you create a password and require only alphanumeric?
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Nothing prevents a website from doing that. Nor from requiring it. Nothing technical, anyway — password policies are something that is decided upon by companies based on many factors.
Everything you press on a keyboard is translated into machine language. That’s how the letters on the screen appear: you tell the keyboard what you want to type by pressing keys, and the computer will display that stuff on the screen *if* the computer knows how to display it.
Everytime you tell the computer to show you a certain character, what actually happens is that you’re asking the computer to display a picture that matches a certain code. The codes for each character are agreed upon all over the world by dorks and nerds and are called Standards.
A person with no Standards might end up married to someone with no Character.
If the computer or website does not accept certain character codes, then the computer or website will not display those characters.
A long time ago some developers didn’t know how to properly save these special characters to a database. So companies started putting these idiotic policies in place instead of teaching their devs how to program.
We had huge problems from lots of code that improperly handled them and it has taken a lot of effort to fix that.
As far as today – there is no valid reason for the policies to stick around.
Whatever text you enter a computer then has to handle in order to make useful. If you are very, very clever about how you enter text in an online form (even a password field) you can trick the computer into thinking it’s code to execute instead of a form response; if you can do that you can make it do all kinds of things the people who built the form don’t want it to do.
However there are plenty of well-known and documented ways to prevent this. Any website in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty two that still prohibits special characters is just being too lazy to make sure they’re sanitizing their inputs properly.
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