Re: Inidicator Arrow convention for Sort Order

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 13:31:04 GMT, Roedy Green
<my_email_is_posted_on_my_website@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote, quoted or
indirectly quoted someone who said :

Which way should an arrow point to indicate an ascending sort or an
ascending list follows?

For an ascending sort the bigger numbers are at the bottom.

So no matter which way you do it, you can misinterpret.

Is there some other less ambiguous convetion to use?

There are other sources of ambiguity:

is in the arrow telling you how the sort is NOW or how you want it to
be if you click it?

Yet another source of ambiguity. When you write elements you start at
the top and work down. When you look at a pile, you think of starting
at the bottom and working up.

Does the arrow represent the direction you read to see ever bigger
entries or does it represent the order the computer went though the
list when it was writing the page top to bottom?

SAP uses a red triangle array pointing up means the data are sorted
ascending NOW.

here are two other conventions from Oliver Biot.


I would propose to use an unambiguous convention, maybe
with 3 triangles of increasing size pointing left to right
for natural sort order, and the vertically flipped image
for the reverse order. This assumes a left-to-right writing
convention, of course :)

Another possibility is to write a->z (z<-a) for text columns
and 0->9 (9<-0) for numeric columns. We could do a similar
thing for date/time columns.


Because there are so many ways to interpret this, perhaps trying to
indicate direction will inevitable confuse folk who presume the other
convention. perhaps a colour code.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.
.

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