XBOX 360 2566

More of a pain in the butt than not supporting diacritical marks at all, but supporting diacritical marks is mandatory now.

Sure you can sort. It's not as easy as it was in the plain ASCII days, but what is. You build up your comparison string letter by letter, either ignoring the diacritical marks or treating them as a second-level sort. The process is not that different whether you're sorting letter+diacritical mark composed as one codepoint or you're sorting letter+diacritical mark as separate codepoints.

"Self-contained" characters are not really an option once you're supporting Vietnamese and some other non-European languages written in the Roman alphabet. Since you have to support separate codepoints for diacritical marks for those languages anyway, you might as well do the same for the European languages.

I'll try again. The headings in the catalogs come from different cultures. It was tremendously confusing to be looking at an alphabetical list of breastles and have O with an umlaut sort as OE if it's German but not if it's Swedish. The same problem exists whether you're using cards or an online catalog. In fact, the problem is worse online because the user has to be able to type what he's looking for rather than flipping through cards.

The trouble is it's different languages with the same alphabet.

-- Patrick