Continuous separating families in ordered spaces and strong base conditions (Q1602957)

The authors study continuous separating families in the class of linearly ordered and generalized ordered topological spaces. A topological space \(X\) is said to have a continuous separating family if there is a continuous function \(\Phi:X^2\smallsetminus \Delta \rightarrow {\mathcal C}_u (X)\), where \({\mathcal C}_u(X)\) is the space of continuous real-valued functions on \(X\) with the uniform convergence topology and \(\Delta\) is the diagonal, such that \(\Phi(x,y)(x)\not = \Phi(x,y)(y)\) whenever \(x\) and \(y\) are distinct points in \(X\) (compare with \textit{E. N. Stepanova}'s articles [Math. Notes 53, No. 3, 308-314 (1993); translation from Mat. Zametki 53, No. 3, 92-101 (1993; Zbl 0805.54028); Mosc. Univ. Math. Bull. 49, No. 6, 41-43 (1994); translation from Vestn. Mosk. Univ., Ser. I 1994, No. 6, 69-71 (1994; Zbl 0881.54031)]). Among other things, they establish that the existence of a continuous separating family in a generalized ordered space yields hereditary paracompactness, and that in a separable generalized ordered space, the existence of a continuous separating family gives a \(G_\delta\)-diagonal. On the other hand, they show that -- even in the restrictive context of linearly ordered topological spaces -- paracompact spaces having strong base properties (such as point-countable bases or \(\sigma\)-disjoint bases) and a continuous separating family need not be metrizable.