Joyce Wilson wrote:
The change I would like is to have spaces taken into account in the name sort.
So we would have something like this:
Green, Alice Green, Robert Greenacre, Janet Greenjeans, Mr.
instead of like this:
Greenacre, Janet Green, Alice Greenjeans, Mr. Green, Robert
We can't do that because our database server at ibiblio uses POSIX collation. We cannot ask ibiblio to change that because the server is shared between multiple sites hosted at ibiblio and POSIX is the most general collation. Maybe the next software upgrade will allow us to set collation per database. Re-sorting database output on the web server is impracticable because it would add considerable overhead to the database and web server load. But the most important argument against changing anything is that we dont want to impose the preference of any one user over the rest of the world. There are just too many collation strategies: Classic Spanish treasts 'ch' and 'll' as single letters. Norwegian sorts 'aa' to the top or bottom according to pronunciation. German phonebooks sort 'ö' as 'oe', but Austrian phonebooks sort 'ö' after 'o'. Dutch phonebooks sort 'ij' as 'y', but Belgian phonebooks do not. Now, which one should we prefer? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org