@bdarcus
@fbennett
@rmzelle
@adamsmith

What do you think?
Is it possible or not?

This requirement is consistent with the recommendations of the Office québécois de la langue française. I know that French speaking people in Europe are more and more adapting the citation styles to the English language, but it is less common in Québec...

The recommended sorting form for the authors name is like this :
FAMILY, Given, et Given FAMILY
FAMILY, Given, Given FAMILY et Given FAMILY
FAMILY, Given, Given FAMILY, Given FAMILY et Given FAMILY
etc.

Could I address a request to the CSL developers to make this form possible in the future? How could it be done?

TOPO style guide (sorry but the INSPQ Web site is temporarily closed in reason of cyberattacks by Anonymous on the government Web sites):
http://www.inspq.qc.ca/pdf/publications/CollectionTOPO/TOPO_zoterostyleguide.pdf

Guide de présentation des citations et des références bibliographiques, École nationale d'administration publique (ENAP):
http://www.bibliotheque.enap.ca/Bibliotheque/docs/Formation_documentaire/Guide_pres_citations_ref_biblio.pdf

Recommendations of the Office québécois de la langue française concerning the « Éléments de la notice bibliographique » :
http://66.46.185.79/bdl/gabarit_bdl.asp?id=3245

@Rintze

Sorry to be bothersome with this request, but I came across something today that would be worth telling you. I promote the use of Zotero among my colleagues, and it is usually easy to demonstrate the superiority of Zotero over ReferenceManager (the supported reference management tool at the Institute). But RefMan offers the possibility to generate bibliography with or without a comma before the "et" in the authors list. Even if it is not a primary issue, it would be a real disappointment not to get that in CSL.

Thanks a lot address this issue! Unfortunately, I can't be helpful in terms of how doing this...

@Gracile, yes, sorry for being sloppy. The current case would need extension of "delimiter-precedes-last", not "delimiter-precedes-et-al".

Thanks again for agreeing this request.
Reading your ticket, I am not sure the issue is clear, and I will try to explain it more clearly.

A basic rule of French syntax is concerned here. Generally, the comma and the "et" are equivalent. In a list of two, the items are separated by "et". In a list of more than two, the itemms are separated by commas, but the last two items who are separated by "et".
List:
"Les yeux et la bouche."
"Les yeux, la bouche et le nez."

Nevertheless, there are cases where the "et" is preceded by a comma, namely when words are put between commas, as between brackets.
Sentence:
"Il marchait, les yeux au ciel, et ne voyait pas la pelure de banane."

In our issue, the problem is due to the reversal of the order of first name and surname of the first author only. The result is bracketing the first name of the first author, when there are two authors in the list.
"BOURDIEU, P., et J.-P. CHAMBOREDON"
When there are more than two authors, the comma is not needed before the "et", as generally in French.
"BOURDIEU, P., J.-P. CHAMBOREDON et J.-P. PASSERON"

To answer the question in your last comment, there are styles that abbreviate to show more than two authors in the bibliography. The abbreviation to show the first author usually concern the in-text citations.
So, we need:
"DOE et al."
"J. DOE et al."
"DOE, J., et al." (not "J. DOE, et al.", but if I am not wrong this makes no difference to the issue)
"J. DOE, S. SMITH et al."

(French styles would use as abbreviation for authors: "et collab.", "et autres" or "et al.". The italics would be needed for "et al.", given that it is in Latin language.)

that's very helpful as an explanation - I would rethink how we approach this then.
If I understand correctly, in styles following these rules, there is always a comma after a name in what CSL calls "sort-order" (i.e. in the form lastname, firstname/initial) - unfortunately it's not quite always - this doesn't apply to single authors.

So if we just add an option to the name-as-sort-order option that's something like "first-with-delimiter" that would solve both the "et al
and the "et" cases here.

Also, using contextual-inverse _won't_ work, if I understand this correctly. Imagine e.g. a piece authored by two institutions. That would be
OECD et UNESCO (or whatever they abbreviate as in French ;-) rather then OECD, et UNESCO.

so we would use for the cases BarliG provides:
<name sort-separator=", " name-as-sort-order="first-with-delimiter" delimiter=", " and="text" delimiter-precedes-last="never">
to be clear - this is a proposal, not something that exists already.

good point - all of the usual suspects (APA, Chicago, ASA, AAA, APSA) have a comma before the end.

@adamsmith, this is really something that needs to be set on the "delimiter-precedes-et-al" and "delimiter-precedes-last" attributes. "name-as-sort-order" should only control the order of name-parts. The logic we need seems to be:

only include the name delimiter before the [last name]/["et-al" term] if the preceding name is flipped as a result of name-as-sort-order

(this would exclude names that can't be flipped, such as UNESCO)

We could call the option "after-flipped-name", or something like that. E.g.

name-as-sort-order="first" and delimiter-precedes-last="after-flipped-name":
"Red Cross, OECD and UNESCO"
"Doe, J., G. Brown and D. Smith"
"Doe, J., and D. Smith"
"Doe and Smith"

name-as-sort-order="all" and delimiter-precedes-last="after-flipped-name":
"Red Cross, OECD and UNESCO"
"Doe, J., Brown, G., and Smith, D."
"Doe, J., and Smith, D."
"Doe and Smith"

From my point of view (in the case of TOPO style), it makes more sense to omit the comma before the last name if the preceding-last is not flipped, even if it ends on a period.

"Doe, J., G. Brown Jr. et D. Smith"

sounds good to me. To keep terminology unified I'd suggest calling the option "after-sort-ordered-name" but I see that's a big of a hyphenated monster, so I'd be OK with flipped, too.

I settled on "after-inverted-name". Open for review/comments:

https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/97#issuecomment-6620122