🚀 go-pugleaf

Markus Kuhn (mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de) writes:
>>I believe you.  I'm sure that the analogous statement is true for French.  But
>>I'm almost as sure that Swedish readers won't want "a-circle" to be anywhere
>>near "a".  I think your flexibility on this is a language-relative phenomenon.
>
>This would be really bad news, could someone from Sweden coment on this?

Just adding my voice to the crowd: if you are talking about a default
sort order, maybe. If you are talking about a standard to replace all
existing orders: just forget it!

>My idea is, that there is one latin alphabet, that is known by everyone
>using a latin script:
>
>  abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
>
>And the following rule may be understood by every user within less then
>10 seconds:
>
>  sort latin characters with diacritics (e.g. "a, 'a, ^a, ...) near their
>  pure latin version a.

It may not be a very good solution even for a default sort order. Say
you have a catalogue of persons. You've read in the paper about Lech
Walesa and want to see if he is in the catalogue. You find Walde (whoever
that is) and directly after Walde you see Walters, so you conclude
that Walesa is not in the catalogue. But he is - after Walters, since
the name of the Polish president actually is Wal/e,sa, but the papers
you read always replaces the special Polish characters with what they
have in store.

A default sort order should probably sort according to the English
(not Latin!) alphabet and the co-sort look-alikes so that they are
only significant when nothing else is different.

Of course that applies to Latin-based languages only.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se