I'm really curious why no one who asks for alphabetical sorting posits a SPECIFIC use-case scenario. I mean, on the surface I understand why people ask for this, but then as I think about it I begin to wonder what the point really is. In the context of this specific request, you talk about podcast links/links referred to in the podcast. I'm not sure I understand how alpha-sorting applies. Do you tell people to go and look at the posts beginning with "P"? I would expect that, were I to go to your del.cio.us links, I would find links tagged for your podcast and with additional subject tags. I would expect to see newer links first. What SPECIFIC need does alpha sort provide? Or maybe I'm listening and I know there was a link mentioned that had the word "wikicities" in it-- would I go and browse alphabetically for www.wickicities.com? or the title where the word is probably not the first word in the title anyway?
I'm NOT Being hostile, I'm honestly curious. When I direct people to del.icio.us links I tend to do it in these ways: to a specific link to a tag I'm trying to imagine the scenario in which your users will want to browse alphabetically rather than contextually. I've never once wanted to sort my links alphabetically, so maybe it's just foreign to me. I'd either be directing my users to a specific link X, to all links about Y, or to links associated with the podcast Z-- Anyway, I'm curious in a very specific manner if you could illustrate how this would work. One thing to keep in mind here is that many people ask for things they feel are useful even when the general usage doesn't show that to be true. I'm reminded of date-based weblog archives. People get very upset when they aren't available even though, generally, you'll find that they are almost never actually used. So it isn't as easy as saying "these changes would be obviously more usable"-- it is easy to say "this would obviously provide more variety of access" but that isn't necessarily a "good" thing. I don't think that creating the SQL query order is necessarily the issue, though even that raises some questions as to what exactly is being sorted... the title I presume? should it handle initial modifiers? what about unicode, etc etc. At any rate, some specific examples might help make your case. So far it is pretty abstract and I'm still not seeing the utility. c _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
