At 05:07 PM 10/7/03 +0200, Kent Karlsson wrote:
> >A question about the issues already open: What is the justification for > >proposing to make Braille Lo?
Shortly before this came up as a "Public Review Issue", I suggested that Braille characters should not be regarded as ignorable symbols when collating texts. I.e. that they should have "level one" weights in the default weighting table. The reason being that they are more often used for letters than for other things. (However, I did not ask to make them "Lo"...)
That reasoning doesn't really apply. When data-streams contain a mixture of Braille and other character codes, then one would assume that the Braille is merely cited for the sighted, in which case it's used as a symbol.
When data streams contain exclusively Braille, then they are actually used as intended. To sort such data would require a tailoring based on the Braille mapping being used.
Which you recognize implicitly:
That would be for the default ordering. Wanting a more "alphabetically proper" ordering, would still require tailoring for that particular correspondence between "ordinary" letters and Braille, but not require converting to the "ordinary" letters. Each such tailoring would give level 1 weights to most of the Braille characters used in that system of usage.
That may be true, but I still don't see what difference a change in default mapping would offer. For people reading the braille, it provides a random, almost binary ordering, which would seem to swamp all benefits of it being level 1. [If all data to be sorted has weights only on the same level(s), the results should be unaffected by which those levels are. Or am I missing something here?]
For people using data with Braille embedded, e.g. instructional material, I don't see the benefit of sorting the Braille as if it was letters by default. If you wanted to sort a list, like a Braille to English phrasebook, then you would need a tailored sort anyway.
A./
