Language attributes- what are they?

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Fri Dec 31 16:15:14 CET 2004


> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan at reutershealth.com]

> The point, as I understand it, is that when you sort something like a
list
> of names, you need to sort them according to the reader's expectation,
not
> according to the rules used in the language to which the names belong.

That certainly indicates that a sort ID, in principle, need not have any
intrinsic relationship to the language or spelling conventions of the
content, although the writing systems must have some similarity in their
character inventories.

But the other part of "you need to sort them according to the reader's
expectation" is that it involves control over a display process and thus
implies an API rather than simply declaring attributes of static
content, which in my mind is a significant distinction in this matter.



Peter Constable


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