Train of Sort

The best approach to interoperability is to focus on getting widespread, conformant implementation of the XSLT 2.0 specification.

I just quoted from Microsoft's statement on XML Schema. Mhm, am so dazzled that I might have mistyped.

Actually it is quite wrong. There are some bugs in XML Schema specification e.g. undefined but significant order that happens with a combination of complex type extensions and substitution groups. None of XML schema implementation can be consistent with broken specification.

Train of Sort #1 - introduction

I have been working on our own text string collation engine that works like Windows. In other words I am working on our own System.Globalization.CompareInfo. Yesterday I posted the first working patch which is however highly unstable.

We used to use ICU for our collation engine, and currently it is disabled by default. Sadly there were some problems between our need and ICU. Basically ICU is for Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA). Windows collation history started earlier than that of UCA, so it has its own way for string collation.

Since Windows collation is older, it has several problems that UCA does not have. Michael Kaplan, the leading Windows I18N developer (if you are interested in I18N his blog is kinda must read), once implied that Windows collation does better than UCA (he did not assert that Windows is better, so the statement is not incorrect). When I read that, I thought it sounds true. UCA - precisely, Default Unicode Collation Element Table (DUCET) - looks less related to native text collation (especially when it just depends on codepoint order in Unicode). However, on digging into Windows collation, I realized that it is not true. So here I start to describle the alternative side of Windows collation for a few days.