Four
On the finality of rulings
All rulings of this Ministry are final within the jurisdiction that requested them and void everywhere else. This is not a limitation of the Ministry. It is the subject matter.
Every ruling this Ministry has issued is correct. Several of them contradict each other.
Nothing below is simulated. Your browser performs each ordering itself, using whatever collation data it ships with, and the plot states below which collation it actually resolved. A curve is drawn only where a jurisdiction moves an entry: green where it sorts the entry earlier, amber where it sorts it later. Where the curves cross, two jurisdictions have swapped a pair over. An entry that never moves is set in grey, having caused nobody any trouble.
Turkish has two letter I's, and they are different letters. Dotted i uppercases to dotted İ. Dotless ı uppercases to plain I. Lowercasing is therefore not a universal operation, and software that assumes it is has been failing in Turkey ever since, often at the login screen.
A program lowercases what you typed, compares it against a stored value, and finds them different, because one machine was set to Turkish and the other was not. The comparison is correct. The strings are genuinely not the same. No party to the comparison has made a mistake; the mistake is further up, in having decided to compare this way at all.
A system keeps you out of a reserved account by lowercasing what you typed and comparing it against a list. Lowercasing is a matter of nationality. Not yours: the machine's. The Ministry did not intend to acquire a national security brief. It is about to acquire one by deduction, which is the only way this Ministry acquires anything.
The reserved list is the same. The input is the same. The code is the same. Only the locale of the server differs, and on one of these two machines the guard does not hold. This is why the guidance on the matter is so specific: a case-insensitive comparison made for a security decision must be an ordinal one. The invariant culture is not a substitute, because it is still linguistic; it is merely linguistic in a way that does not depend on where the server is. The check demonstrated above is the wrong one, written the way it is usually written.
The Ministry has no view on who ought to be admitted. It observes only that the answer presently depends on the nationality of the server, that the server was never asked to declare one, and that the person at the gate has no way of knowing which country they are being judged in.
The Ministry reached that conclusion by ordinary deduction, was startled by it, checked the working twice, and found the working sound. The two premises are demonstrated above, in the order they were established.
Each of these is the correct order in the place that uses it. The Ministry has ruled in favour of all of them.
| Jurisdiction | Ruling | Order |
|---|---|---|
| Sweden | Å, Ä and Ö are letters in their own right and come after Z. A Swedish telephone directory ends in a place an English one has never heard of. | … x y z å ä ö |
| Germany | Ä sorts as A under the general ordering rules, and as AE when what is being ordered is a list of names, which is the convention a telephone book follows. Both are standardised, as parts one and two of the same standard. | ä = a, or ae |
| Estonia | Z sits between S and T, which is where it has always been, and is a persistent surprise to every piece of software that assumed Z ends the alphabet. | … s š z ž t … |
| Czechia | CH is one letter and sorts after H, so chyba comes after hudba and well after cukr. | … h ch i … |
| Spain, until 1994 | CH and LL were letters, sorted after C and L. The academy abolished them as sorting units, and the books printed before the decision are still on the shelf, still ordered the old way. | … c ch d … l ll m … |
| The machine, given no instructions | Compares UTF-16 code units, so Zebra arrives before apple. It is often described as putting every capital before every lowercase letter, which holds only for unaccented ASCII: in the plot above, lowercase apple precedes capital Äpfel. This is the ordering a program produces when nobody has chosen one. | UTF-16 units |
Filed in the Ministry's own order, which is alphabetical. Four therefore precedes One, and Three precedes Two, because f comes before o and three comes before two. The Ministry is aware of how this looks and declines to file its rulings in an order it does not itself endorse.
All rulings of this Ministry are final within the jurisdiction that requested them and void everywhere else. This is not a limitation of the Ministry. It is the subject matter.
The Ministry declines to define surname. Several jurisdictions place the family name first, several use no family name at all, and the Ministry has been asked to rule on which half of a name is the important half. It will not.
Item 10 sorts before item 9 whenever the sort is alphabetical, which it usually is. The Ministry regards this as correct, widely understood, and the single most reported defect in its history. It notes that this ruling is numbered Three and, by alphabetical accident, is also filed third, the only point on this page where the two systems agree.
Whether New York precedes Newark depends on whether a space sorts before a letter. Both answers ship. The Ministry notes that the two orderings put the same two cities either side of each other and that nobody has ever noticed.