it could .. but it wouldn't need to be specified as part of every request it could be baked into the solrconfig .. we could even make the default behavior be to not bother with the ";" syntax, and document in the CHANGES.txt that people who want the old behavior need to explicitly add some default param to get it (we already have a comment to the same affect regarding json.nl=map)
If you all are up for it, i think the cleanest thing is to require the sort param and not support the ';' but I don't have a sense of who or how this will affect anyone.
