OT: Re: thunar + mountpoints + sort by name and case

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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On 7/13/2006 9:10 AM, Joe Klemmer wrote:

> 	I don't look down on people for liking things different from me.  My
> rant was more aimed at Microsoft than any users, though it's likely that
> some could easily take it as such.

There are plenty of reasons to rant about Microsoft, but I don't really
see this as one of them.  Sort order is a relatively arbitrary decision
(outside of any standards, which you could say are pretty arbitrary as
well), at least for the 4 classes of characters you mentioned.  Why
should special characters come at the beginning instead of the end?  Why
do numbers come before letters?  I can't think of a logical reason for
this; it seems pretty arbitrary.  It only seems logical because it's
what we're used to seeing.  Unless I'm missing something here.

As for separating case when sorting...  The only "logical" reason I can
see for this is an implementation detail: ASCII defines the capitals and
lowercase letters in two separate, contiguous chunks.  But I think any
usability guy would remind us that implementation details are poor
things on which to base one's user interface.

	-brian

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