Sorting is ordering data: alphabetically, numerical, by day, week (by number again) and/or month.
All these sorting orders are based on random lists. By random I do not imply a mathemacical random list, but just the fact that we assigned an order to words, and because everyone knows the order, the list becomes a functional tool.
Most people do not have to think about whether a 4 comes before a 7, or that the month of January is the first of the year. The fact that we all have a complete image of these things in our mind, makes them so practical.

But does it make sense for the navigation of a website?

In a website the navigations is about information (that is not everything, I will get to that), which is something different then data.
I had a look at the dictionary entries:

Information: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence

Data: factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation

The 2 definitions tell me that data is used to generate information. Information emanates from data, it is the basis on which we can form a decision or some reasoning.

Well, if we apply this idea to the navigation of a website, we should be putting organised information on the website and that information should be coming from the data we collected as a basis to create the website.
Sounds good, but what about the visitor? People could still argue that sorting can be applied to information to ease scanning of the list, to guide the visitor of the website.

Guidance

The argument to ease scanning is actually a valid one, though not good enough, I think. People scan pages, they tend to skip most of the things available on a website. And now it comes down to what you want as a webmaster, do you want people to see the items that start with an A first, or do you want a visitor to see things that are important first?

I guess the answer should be clear, the important things should go on top and the order should be the order of importance. Importance, of course, can be defined in different ways ( from a user perspective or from a business pespective) but it certainly is not following the order of a very famous random list. If you want to guide the visitor, you should give them the most important bits of information first.

Translations

The reason why I came up with this subject is that I had an argument with a colleague after I noticed they had sorted the list of services by alphabet. A first, B second, etc… you know :-)
Now, the thing is that the most important service started with an A, and that the manager in charge is responsible for that product. In this rare case, the alphabetical sorting order matched the order of importance (from the business point of view).

This is an exception and will not happen very often, but lets look at this example and see what might happen in the future. The service is an international service in Europe and it has to cather for the south of europe. In my experience with international websites that try to reach the public in the south of europe, you need a translation in the local language.

Ok, you already know what is going to happen to your nicely alphabetical order, right?

Once you start creating multi language websites, you have no way of ordering a list alphabetically and keeping the order of the items in the list.
I wrote about this before, as I was faced with a sorting problem of a list in Chinese

When everything else fails

When your website navigation fails, and your visitor cannot find what he/she is looking for, an alphabetical list of keywords, a sitemap where the subelements are ordered alphabetically, and/or a monthly list of posts on a blog, are valid examples of pages where you can alphabetically sort information. But that is when everything else fails …

I am sure there are other reasons why it is bad to sort you information as you do with data on a website, but for now this is what I experienced.
Please leave a message if you had similar experience with this kind of problems.

• How to sort a list of product in Chinese?
• The Chinese language doesn’t use an alphabet so how can we sort?

The Kangxi dictionary, compiled during the Qing dynasty, mentioned 46,964 characters so that doesn’t work

There have been numerous attempts at getting this working but only 2 are really in use.
The first one is the use of radicals and the number of strokes. The second one is a search based on sound using phonetics.

Sorting by Radicals

The Wikipedia gives the following definition of a radical:

A radical (from Latin radix, meaning “root”) is a basic identifiable component of every Chinese character. (This includes not only Chinese Hanzi, but also the Japanese Kanji, Korean Hanja and Vietnamese Chữ nôm and Chữ nho.) In languages that use Chinese characters, a radical is called 部首 (Pinyin: bùshǒu; Japanese bushu and Korean busu), literally meaning “section header”. Radicals are important to the organisation and use of Chinese dictionaries, Japanese Kanji dictionaries, and Korean Hanja dictionaries.

Wikipedia

The first one, sorting by radical, uses the 214 basic forms compiled in 1615 in China.
This brings it to a more manageable number instead if the 46,964 that we know from the Kangxi dictionary.

The sort order of each “word” is based on the radical from which it is derived. Every character or word is based on a basic radical that has a specific order. Try the application from Jim Breen and you will notice that very complex characters sometimes map to a 2 stroke radical or a set of radicals. Then the order of the radicals is based on the number of strokes used to form the character.

I am sure a lot more rules need to be considered but this is a fascinating problem when it comes to databases. A solution might be to map each character to another table with all the radicals and do a lookup for each character you want to sort.

Multi-lingual lists

Now that you know about Chinese lists, consider a product database with one-to-one translated product names for English and Chinese. Sorting these lists will result in 2 very different sort orders cause the logic behind the sort is in no way related to each other.

In this case the problem is really a cultural problem opposed to the initial problem (sorting Chinese characters). Because the sorting order is based on cultural differences and ideas about language and characters. If you know these 2 languages and you sort the English list, the location of the Chinese translation in the list is completeley different. Going back and forth in such a list will give different results based on the language.

Sorting Chinese lists is a technical problem. A problem that shows that IT services and systems are not created with these multi-cultural information structures in mind.

I am sure I missed several things in this short article, so if you spot an error, leave a comment and I will study some more.

Het overgewicht van het management weegt duidelijk meer dan dat van de gebruiker: de agent of de klant aan de lijn.