As discussed on tei-l, there is a need in institutions to sort descriptions of objects according to rules that are to complicated to do it on the fly. As the position of such a description in the sequence of sorted descriptions is "stable" and also an important characteristic of the data, it seems reasonable to have the possibility to store the sorting key in an attribute. As those objects may have multiple identifiers, each of them possibly used for display and thus object for the sorting, it might be necessary not (only) to add the description as a whole (msDesc) but also the identifier of the object described itself (idno) to the class att.sortable.
As discussed on tei-l, there is a need in institutions to sort descriptions of objects according to rules that are to complicated to do it on the fly. As the position of such a description in the sequence of sorted descriptions is "stable" and also an important characteristic of the data, it seems reasonable to have the possibility to store the sorting key in an attribute. As those objects may have multiple identifiers, each of them possibly used for display and thus object for the sorting, it might be necessary not (only) to add the description as a whole (msDesc) but also the identifier of the object described itself (idno) to the class att.sortable.
Original comment by: schassan