So I built a website for the client. The website is hit by thousands of external users each month.

I defined everything pertaining to style in a separate stylesheet. This adds value to the customer because they're able to change colors, fonts, bolds, italics, alignments, etc to suit whatever needs they have moving forward (marketing changes the company's "look", for example) without any code changes being made. For those of you not in the industry, this can make the product more reuseable moving forward.

Well, some of the website's forms have required fields. I denoted which fields are required by displaying the field's label in a different color. This color is defined in the stylesheet the customer controls.

Because the customer can change the color used to denote required fields moving forward, I designed the website to not specifically say what color was applied to required fields.

Instead, I applied the color defined in the stylesheet to the following phrase, which I put at the top of the forms:

COLORED FIELDS ARE REQUIRED.

That way, if they change the color moving forward, no code changes are required (as opposed to if I had put "BLUE FIELDS ARE REQUIRED" at the top of all the pages).

This has been in production for MONTHS now.

Today I get an email asking to have it changed to BLUE FIELDS ARE REQUIRED (the color presently being used is blue) so as to avoid "offending people."

I'm a sensitive guy when it comes to people being offended, but that made me just laugh out loud. Despite the email looking nothing but sincere, I couldn't help for a split second but wonder if they were joking in the request.

Needless to say they were not.