The i18n group said we’d figure out collator options by email. This is an email ☺
First I’d like to say something about the scope of collator’s in EcmaScript: I don’t think it’s reasonable to write a database in Javascript. I think people should instead use a database engine in some form, likely on the server. So there’s an interesting problem around behavior: The client side comparison effectively cannot be EXACTLY the same as what the server sends. Even if “everyone” used the same underlying data and framework, there’d still be versioning issues. So: there’s going to be some disparities that developers will have to work around. For example: if I query a server for some records and it returns 50 of 200 records, then if I sort them locally, they may end up in a different order than the server sent them. More interestingly, the client and server may disagree about which of the 200 records are the first 50. (One could sort record 51 in location 50 or something). So that could impact code, or the user experience, that advances pages. I don’t see this as a problem to be solved, because a) It’d be really hard to get all the systems to use the same collation algorithm, at least in the short term, and b) Even if we did get everyone to use exactly the same data, there’d likely be subtle bugs because sorting’s “hard”, and c) Even if everyone did exactly the same thing, there’d still be variations due to new characters being added to Unicode, bug fixes, or other revisions, and d) it’s impractical to carry multiple versions (particularly on clients) because the data we’re talking about is pretty big (10s of megabytes, not quite sure how it behaves in ICU). I just wanted to be explicit about how collation works so that we could agree that absolute parity is effectively out of scope due to practical concerns if nothing else. Actually, I don’t want to randomize the options thread, so I’ll stop here and start a different thread about that. - Shawn http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste
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