Re: <table type="rowsortable">

David Dailey wrote:
> Desired: <table type="rowSortable">
> Description: Whenever a user clicks on the top (head) of a column, the
> rows of the associated tbody become re-ordered according to the data type
> of that column.
> [---]
> (we may sort alphabetically by "from" or "subject" or chronologically
> by "date").

Sorting is a complex problem...

When sorting alphabetically, you have to take into account, that in
different languages the alphabetical sorting order is different.

Sorting by date/time is a complete mess, because of the almost infinite
number of ways one can represent date, plus ambiguity: which date-time
does "03.04" refer to? 3rd april or 4th March? March 2004?
Or maybe it's actually four minutes past three?

Numbers are probably the easiest, but you still have to consider
the conventions in different locales. For example in english thousands
are separated with comma, but in estonian, the comma as the decimals
separator, and sometimes the period might be used as thousands
separator:
The speed of light in english:  1,079,252,848.8 km/h
The speed of light in estonian: 1.079.252.848,8 km/h

When you also take into account different units (1MB is larger than
100KB which is larger than 1000 bytes), the task becomes
almost impossible, because you can't write a solution that would
work with the not yet known units that we will be using in the
future.

I'd say it's a task too hard to give to the browsers, that can't
even get right the "trivial" task of rendering appropriate quotes
around <q> elements.

Rene Saarsoo

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2007 21:17:16 UTC