1 Items Found [sic]

If you're showing a textual label such as "N items found", please, pretty please, put the logic in there to hide the "s" when N is equal to one.  Same goes for changing "children" to "child", etc.  It's not hard, and it makes your software look retarded (or super enterprise-y) when you don't do it.  And no, i18n doesn't count as a reason to skip it: use ChoiceFormat (or the equivalent in your language) or get a better library.

3 responses to “1 Items Found [sic]”

  1. PaulH

    while ChoiceFormat certainly helps, knowing if a locale uses plurals & especially how they pluralize isn't trivial. core java isn't so hot at that, icu4j has a PluralFormat that takes away quite a bit of this sort of pain.

  2. marc esher

    "super enterprise-y"… that's awesome!

    if it were super duper mega 10,000-dollar-a-seat enterprise-y, it's pop up a javascript alert that read "we have detected that you have elected choices resulting in one or more results. Please Click 'OK' to display the header in singular. Please Click 'Cancel' to display the header in plural". Please click "Ignore" to allow the system to display an appropriate choice based on its proprietary Intelli-DetectOr technology".

    and it'd be from Oracle. or Intuit Quickbase. Or a hellspawned combination of the two

  3. Dave DuPlantis

    If l10n is an issue, you can always use "Items found: N".

    At least in some languages.