Official position of both Académie française and Office québécois de la langue française is that accents must be preserved in capital letters. However, it is common in France to drop them, while they are almost always preserved in Québéc. I have heard that the reason is that European French keyboard layout makes it difficult to type accented capital letters, unlike Québécois French layout which makes writing them easy. But I am not sure if this is the cause rather than the effect of the practice.
I have an anecdote on this: on birth certificates, family names are written in capital letters. It turns out my partner name ends with a É which was written as E in her birth certificate. She never noticed (it had never prevented her to get national ID with her name properly accented) until we had our first kid which has both our names, and they refused to have the name accented until we had my partner's birth certificate updated (which as you can imagine is quite an adventure, since you need to dig ancient family birth certificates to prove it was originally written with an accent...).
What's weird is I sometimes, even 10 years ago, would get an email from people in France, and it would have an accented A. Like, how did they do that..
korean is worse. they base off of 10k, not 1000. so a million is hundred ten_thousand. bagman. but as bad as that is, it's no 97 amirite.
http://j.poitou.free.fr/pro/img/tkn/tw-image.jpg
This idiocy carried over. The recent layout update makes dead accents more accessible:
But I haven't seen much adoption yet.
Even more if you consider that the minus sign there is not the character - that is used by every programming language.
And there are two more on the 8 key.
I like the mac international keyboard layout, but it still only provides for 4 of those: the non-breaking hyphen and the "proper" minus sign are lacking.
I like that the "new azerty" provides for pretty much every diacritic, even those which are not in use in french.
Plus, there's the issue of diacritical marks. Irish keeps long marks over capitals, but French drops accents. Do you plan to do é => É (required for Irish - POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN is the all-caps version of Poblacht na hÉireann [the Republic of Ireland]) or é => E (common practice for French)? You have to get it right, and you have to know the language to do that. (Poblacht na hÉireann also illustrates the fact that initial caps is also a language-dependent idea; you absolutely can't write Poblacht Na Héireann - that makes my eyes burn just looking at it.)
(And before you say, well, Irish isn't a language spoken by very many people, remember that it's an official language of the European Union. If you're writing software to be used by EU agencies, you're going to have to care.)