XML Dataset - Sorting non english characters

Question

I've been playing with spry on a production site for more
than a year now. It's turned out to be a great solution in many
situations in spite of being a beta release.
I've found an issue concerning the sorting of text data (in
this case, coming from an XML file). You can find the example page
here:
http://mi.esan.edu.pe/elecciones/2008/electores/.
It's in Spanish but i guess you won't need a translation to
understand what's going on; besides you can always check the source
code if so you wish.
Works fine, though I still have some polishing to do. The
most important part of which is fixing the sort order that spry
gives me by default.
If you click on the "go to last page link" (»), located
below the table/dataset area, you will see that after letter Z come
the words, in this case last names, starting with letter A, but
with a tilde on them. I've devised a workaround, but that requires
creating an extra column with everything converted to only English
characters. My list is already 4000 records long and takes a few
seconds to load. It's definitely going to get much longer in the
years to come and I wish I will be able to give my users the
ability to sort by any column they wish. So, I can't just be adding
columns and duplicating data all around.
Is there a way to tell spry that Á should be sorted as
if it was A (not after A, not before it, and definitely not at the
end of the list), that Ñ should come right after N, and so on?
I will very much appreciate your answer.
Regards,
Jose

Answer 1

Thank you very much for your reply, Kin.
Sad thing that there wasn't a solution, though.
But, then I guess you must be aware that spry is being used
and will be used by a huge ammount of non English speaking clients
of Adobe. Namely those of us that have Spanish, French, German,
Japanese, Chinese or any other as their primary language. And all
of us would greatly appreciate a not so English-centered solution,
for such a commonplace feature as sorting is.
Given this situation, what chances do you think there are
that Adobe will be developping the necessary language specific
plugins for spry's sorting capabilities? And, how soon would that
be?
In the meantime, I will start trying to do it myself. It
would be fantastic if you coukd give me any hints on how to start,
javascript is not my strongest point but I think I can crack it out
and have a little fun while I'm at it, too.
Regards,
Jose