Got the sort system working by rewriting the XSLT file till it worked with Saxon. Saxon 8 is very finnicky about stuff like namespaces. The other XSLT will also have to be ported over to work with Saxon 8, so we have a fully XSLT-2.0-based system.

Then I added the extra code to disregard accents in the sort comparator. This simply involves stripping out accents from the strings before doing the comparison. It's an extra stage, so it may add extra processing time, but on the other hand the comparison character string is now shorter (no accents) and the input strings are often going to be shorter once their accents are stripped out, so the net results may not be noticeable. We'll have to see how fast this code runs when we've got more data in the db.

In the process of doing this, we found a bug in the implementation (groups of identical entries were not being sorted together). Fixed that bug.