In my long-running series on why themes are evil, I bring you the newest installment.
Consider the gtk stock icon GTK_STOCK_SORT_ASCENDING which is supposed to represent sorting elements to make them increasing according to some order, typically numerically or alphabetically. The icon for such an action is supposed to somehow convey what happens when it is pressed, all in, say, 24×24 pixels.
Take a look at different themes and how they implement the icon:
eog `find /usr/share/icons/ -print | grep sort-ascending`
This command will show you the icon images with some duplication due to multiple sizes.
Observations:
- Some show an up-arrow, others show a down-arrow. Yet others show a diagonal arrow which isn’t as bad as it sounds because such arrows are annotated.
- Some arrows have no annotations, some are annotated by “1..9”, and yet others are annotated to “a..z”.
Officially this is a mess[tm]. When annotations are present they hint at either numerical or alphabetical ordering which may or may not match what the application does. That’s minor. But when no annotations are present, the situation is far worse: my sort-ascending button looks like someone else’s sort-descending simply because of theme differences!
I don’t know how this mess came about, but it ought to be resolved. I suggest that when the icons look like vertical arrows, sort-ascending should point down because the elements of a list will then be increasing in the direction of the arrow.