I just finished up a pretty large commerce site, Fedex integration, shopping cart, pretty custom stuff in this case. All in all, it was a bear, perhaps the most impressive site I have worked on.

Traffic is picking up and I peek in on it from time to time to see how the orders are looking, making sure everything is up to snuff. I have a page where I can at quick glance look at the billing and shipping data for the order. I would say, one in five are in UPPERCASE.

I do not know what pedantic little OCD I have that makes this irritate me, but god damn it, can you chill out on the caps lock key! At first, I thought it was accidental, sometimes you hit the damn caps lock key and are just on a roll and let it go. There really is no simple way to go from upper case is web forms back to proper case without retyping.

The high frequency this happens at has brought me to another conclusion. 20% of internet users are partly illiterate. I knew this, I just did not know it was in such numbers.

It’s in large part the reason you see a select menu for a state selection. The main reason is you generally want the state abbreviation in the database for optimum storage requirements. The other reason, you would not believe how many people can not spell the very state they live in.

For the retarded internet user, it is just easier to ignore case, and with the added bonus, you can pretty much ignore punctuation as well. It boils down to less thinking on the users part. I cringe when I see it in forums and on mailing lists, as it takes away the entire ability to add EMPHASIS on certain words, as they are now ALL emphasized.

Right now, there are only a few thousand orders in the system, when it hits half a million, I can get some better numbers. I get this feeling, it will not be encouraging, as more and more people get online, I think more and more stupid people are going to be placing orders. I have always wondered what in the heck the caps lock key was even for, I for one, vote to disable it in future OS releases.