On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:22:17 -0800, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I can sympathize with the idea, but one has to keep in mind that the sort order should vary between one language and another. In English we would alphebetize "æ" as though it were "ae" while Danish treats it as a separate letter tagged on at the end of the alphabet.
Of course! The sorting order would have to be determined by the Language object.
I know that well, as the Czech sorting has many rather peculiar features (e.g. in the Czech language, we have a "letter" (digraph) ch that is sorted between H and I -- specifically this would probably be a problem for MediaWiki anyway). For a bit of amusement, our national standard (ČSN 97 6030) governing proper sorting is known for its lack of precision and impossibility to be implemented because its rules are considered to be AI-complete :-). For instance, numerals in text should be sorted according to their meaning. (In practice, simplified interpretations are normally used.)
-- [[:cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]