22
ZioCain
2y

I might have told this in other rants, but this thing (requested from the client) is one of the worst thing I've ever done.

So we were developing a website to find the stores of a certain brand across the country, specifically: Italy.
In Italy, a lot of towns have accents and apostrophes in their name.
Client managers wanted ALL DATA to be capitalized, including letters with accents, but the client management was using Windows and Windows doesn't simply let you enter capital letters with accents from the keyboard, so the client requested to make a procedure to turn every apostrophe into an accent, therefore a town named like "CA' DEL BOSCO" would be "CÀ DEL BOSCO" (which is wrong) as they just couldn't bother copy-pasting from Word.

An important thing to notice is that most Italian towns with apostrophes don't have accents and most towns with accents don't have apostrophes, and that specific routine couldn't figure out what to exactly, so we ended up having all the stuff messed up.

The feature was a total SHIT, but the client was extremely happy with it, so we didn't even bother arguing with that.

Comments
  • 1
    Clients and non tech people are very good at finding one thing that confuses them and asking you change the entire system for it.
  • 1
    Dude...

    Windows allow capitalized caracteres with accent since windows 98.

    The database allows to fold accents and do search with no case sensetivity and ignoring accents.
  • 2
    @NoToJavaScript I know it allows that.
    But it's not easy to type them with the italian keyboard (you should set it to a different language or copy-paste each letter every time)

    and anyway, I could've just put "text-transform" capitalize" in the CSS, but they wanted all caps in the DB...
  • 1
    @ZioCain I live In Quebec, canada.
    I use gaming US keyboard. I have no accents.
    I’m an expert in copy paste to Word, right clicking to add accents.
    Sometimes I introduce spelling mistake just to be able to put the right accent.
    Like :
    “Je passe du temps” VALIDE
    “J’ai passe du temps” : Accent missing. So, I will write « J’ai passeee du temps” to force word to underline it and then right click to get the version with accents I want. “J’ai passé du temps”
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