TIL: Fractional Indexing

In the past when I've done this for web pages and various other interfaces it has been a mess. I've built ungainly sort order in numeric or alphanumeric batches. Inevitably there is a conflict, often sooner rather than later. So sorting a list of things often means updating all the elements to preserve the order in the datastore. I've learned to mark each element with a big value, but it's ugly and ungainly

Fortunately for me, going forward, I now know about Fractional Indexing.

References:

• https://www.figma.com/blog/realtime-editing-of-ordered-sequences/
• https://observablehq.com/@dgreensp/implementing-fractional-indexing
• https://github.com/httpie/fractional-indexing-python