GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 98773
Sort order indicators are inverted
Last modified: 2009-04-22 19:50:53 UTC
Filed based on the resolution of bug 98365. The sort order indicator arrows on the columns are inverted. An "up" arrow means ascending: so "A" before "Z", "little" before "big", "old" before "new". A "down" arrow, of course, means the opposite. Jonathan Blandford writes in bug 86371: This is the correct behavior. The arrow points in the ascending fashion in the order in which the list is read (in this case top to bottom). The list [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] is clearly ascending, and when we display it in a top to bottom direction, we want to keep this property. I contend that this is a design error. Having the "up" arrow mean "ascending" order and the "down" arrow mean "descending" order is well-established convention. Evolution, the OpenOffice file selector, and Windows Explorer all operate in this fashion. GNOME 2 is the first place I recall seeing this convention inverted. This is negatively impacting usability in a number of apps, including the GNOME search tool and Nautilus.
Tricky. There are two ways to look at that marker. One is it is an arrow pointing the direction you read. The other is that it's a physical representation of sizes, from large to small. Windows has apparently opted for the latter. That being said, a quick survey through the office left a lot of people expecting the other, and complaining about outlook/evolution getting the wrong direction when they click on the date. The most common comment was 'I never understood that arrow -- I just clicked until it sorted the right way'. Those that weren't used to either definitely thought it was a directional arrow, though perhaps that was biased by my drawing. I'm tempted to leave it as it is for two reasons. 1) Qt and Mozilla do it this way. While consistency in the Free Software world is somewhat ridiculous, why stray now. 2) Some themes (like Bluecurve) draw the arrows open ended. That is, they look like a '^' and are not filled in at the bottom. This makes them look even more like an arrow, and less like a 'size icon.' To really move this over, I think we'd have to either introduce a stock icon, or a new drawing style.
Just as another data point Battlefield 1942 also agrees with the current GTK+ behavior.
A game? GNOME should follow the major platforms on this. I don't have a Mac available, but screen shots I've found indicate that the OS X file manager puts the arrows in the same direction as Windows Explorer. As to your assertion that changing the current behavior would stray from a supposed Free Software convention, what are Evolution and OpenOffice? Chopped liver? There needs to be a better reason for diverging from the behavior of the two major desktop GUIs than "It's what Mozilla does" and/or "It's what a game does". If Mozilla is diverging from platform standards for something like this, it is clearly wrong. Same goes for Qt. Furthermore, I really don't follow your logic that the arrow should "point in the direction you read." If that were the case, the arrow would *always* point down, since Western scripts proceed left- to-right, top-to-bottom. Certainly the arrow is to indicate the order of the items, not the direction of traversal by the reader. This needs to go to the GNOME usability mailing list, and the result of that discussion should go in the GNOME HIG.
*** Bug 342979 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 366662 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Although this is very old I still think it should be changed. What about fixing it for Gtk+ 3?
See bug 305277. This needs to be fixed in the HIG first.