Why is the vertical stroke in the middle of 田 drawn before the horizontal one in the middle?

Question

I apologize if this is a stupid question, I've just begun learning.

I've noticed that in all hiragana except も and in the (very few) kanji I've learned so far, the horizontal strokes are always drawn first. I'm using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, in which he appoints certain strokes/collections of strokes (which may or may not be kanji in and of themselves) as "primitive elements", forms which combine with each other to form other kanji frequently. If two primitive forms can combine to form a certain shape, then that shape is not a primitive form (since it can be decomposed into primitive forms). (See edit)

He assigns both 十 and 口 as primitive elements, so I initially thought 田 would be the combination of the two, but it was also appointed as a primitive form. I think the reason for this is the stroke order; the vertical stroke in "十" is drawn before the horizontal one when writing "田", unlike the stroke order for the primitive element (and kanji) 十.

My question is, then, why is the vertical stroke in the middle of drawn before the horizontal one, when the opposite is true (in my limited experience) most of the time? Heisig's method of primitive elements means that the kanji are made up of a few basic forms, so why isn't 田 being considered as a combination of the primitive elements 十 and 口, two shapes that appear in a lot of kanji (and hence keep their stroke orders as primitive elements)?

Edit: welp, I feel stupid. Continuing with Heisig's book, I soon found out that he marks 早 a primitive element, even though it is written with both primitive elements 十 and 日 keeping their stroke orders. So I guess what makes a primitive element is just frequent occurence of the form in question specifically in kanji, regardless of whether that form is made of other forms that indepedently occur frequently in other kanji. Sorry for any trouble I might've caused.

Answer 1

There is no reason as to why a character is written with a particular order. As Arfrever has pointed out, the current standard in China for 田 is exactly how you imagined it to be: the horizontal line first.

There is no "correct" order of strokes, it differs by place, and also by time. Take 必 for example, in China, you write the 心 first but without the last dot, then the slash, then the last dot. In Taiwan, you write the whole 心 first, then the slash. In Japan, the order is more complicated, the slash is actually the second stroke, even before the bottom of 心 is written.

Surprisingly, but not surprisingly, all of these three are NOT the stroke order of 必 in ancient times. This character actually consists of 弋 and 八, not 心 and a slash. So in ancient times you write 弋 first then add 八.

You see, stroke order is simply "how a group of people at a certain time collectively decides how to write a character". As location and time changes, the order could also change. There is no absolute "correctness", and there is no point to dig "why is it so and so".