This post is really about display of static tables, not interactive ones.
But in the interactive scenario, you could imagine dragging a column heading left or right to change the sort order - I think it could be quite intuitive.
But in the interactive scenario, you could imagine dragging a column heading left or right to change the sort order - I think it could be quite intuitive.
I don't think the most important column necessarily has to be on the left - in fact these tables already often have the rank to the left of the country name. There are many other ways to convey column importance, such as bolding the values.
If anything the ranking reinforces the idea that a given country is in a given position which is the overall structure and intent of the data (in my view). I’m not likely to look at the table to extract the fact that “7 gold medals is 17th place.” I’m going to see that “country X is 17th place.”
-8 | 1 | Tiger Woods | [other columns]
1 | -8 | Tiger Woods | [other columns]