Also, to the original article's point, it looks like these websites would exclude like half of Québec's population; dual last names are very common here (women keep their names after marriage, making the "mother's maiden name" security question pretty stupid).
Diactrics on uppercase letters weren't that common before: they were officially supposed to be there on uppercase characters but:
- old french typewriters didn't have them (they had the lowercase é, è, à etc. though)
- people using early computers had no idea how to encode them at all (but é, è, à etc. were on the keyboard) [1]
But "ATTENTION MARCHE" and "ATTENTION MARCHÉ" are two very different things. It's simply wrong to use the first one if you meant the second and vice versa.
Now I know a friend who lives in the US and who simply dropped the diacritic from its family name: so now he and his kids have a "different" family name than his family in Europe.
He found it easier that way.
[1] People using Word in the early nineties had to type 'é' and then select that character and go to a menu to transform it to uppercase, because "shift+é" would enter the digit '2'.
This is why I don't use Namecheap anymore fwiw. They used to accept 'ø', they redesigned their interface, I had to add a new debit card to my account, their new system didn't accept 'ø' yet told me to write the name "exactly as it is on the card". Customer service just told me to write a name that's not mine in the billing info; I moved to a different registrar instead.
Why do we even have that field anymore?