I agree stripping umlauts (and accented characters) can come in handy
when searching. For some European countries, at least. Alas, imagine
stripping to some "minor character" in, say, Mandarin, Hangeul,
Russian... As you can see, "reducing" characters in a world with so many
languages is not easy.
An additional thing to consider is that people living in country A
might have set their interface language to country A's language but
still have songs in country B,C and D's language. (And want to search
for them.)
Things like the controller would probably only "wheel" through the
characters of the selected language (mine wheels only through the
English characters, albeit I live in Germany and thus "äöüÄÖÜß" are
missing).
I propose using a more general "wildcard" character instead, like "?"
(for one unknown character) and "*" (for multiple unknown characters)
this is what we use with filesystems ever since.
So, in your case, one could look for Mahler's "R?ckert-Lieder" instead.
Or maybe even "r*ert*lieder" if one didn't know if it was written with
"ck" or only "k" and one didn't know if it was written with or without a
hyphen ("*" standing for zero to n unknown characters in this case).
This type of searching should of course be the same in all Web UI,
soft- and hardware player interfaces. And it would be easy to implement,
too, since Perl knows about RegExp's and both MySQL and SQLite
understand wildcard searches.
For ease of use, I would also propose that devices that use a
scrollable ("wheelable") character set use the uppercase set of
characters of the selected interface language, plus numbers and
punctuation symbols, followed by the lowercase set of the selected
interface language, probably followed by some "agreed-upon" base
character set (i.e., USASCII). (Using the uppercase equivalents first is
based on usability researches which have shown they are in most
languages easier to distinguish and thus easier to find on wheeling
devices like the controller and things like touch screens.)
Thus, Russian, for example, would present Russian characters and
numbers in the Controller's interface, followed by the latin A-Z.
This would make searching in the user's language easier (assumed he has
most of his titles in the local language), plus allow searching for
"foreign" ASCII-labelled titles.
Using wildcards like "?" and "*" in ANY language set would make finding
things with foreign characters much easier (like, say, French accents).
--
Moonbase
Moonbase: 'The Problem Solver' (http://www.kaufen-ist-toll.de/moonbase)
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