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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

One thing that seems to get people is 2 finger to scroll divs/iframes in safari. Pretty intuitive when you think about it, but some don't. Especially when the scrollbars aren't obvious.

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Intuitive? I'm not sure you understand that word.

OK, what other method could you have to scroll a div/iframe? It was the first one that I thought might work, so I tried it. Unless I'm mistaken that made it intuitive for me.

I do get your point though - for some people it's not obvious...

Why not use the same mechanism you use to scroll the main document window?

because then if the iframe covers the whole screen, it'd be impossible to scroll the document?

I would expect the standard scrolling gesture to scroll the iframe -- unless the iframe is already scrolled all the way in that direction, in which case it applies the scroll to the iframe's container.

This behavior is intuitive, if slightly inconvenient in some cases, which is exactly the trade-off I'd have expected Apple to make. Requiring an unfamiliar multitouch gesture for a common operation strikes me as the kind of "let's do something cool because we can" geekery that got us middle-click-to-paste in X Windows.

I'm curious: what does the iPhone use to scroll an iframe in an iframe? Three fingers?

Sorry for the off topic comment but I have to say... I love middle-click-to-paste in X Windows! Hooray geekery.

"Intuitive" means I did similar things a hundred times in the past.

I think the whole gestures thing is NOT intuitive. There is nothing that invites the user to do that stuff. I think scrolling is OK because we have all seen it in the iPhone advertisements. But do stuff with 2,3 or even 4 fingers? Why would I ever even try it? It's like pressing CTRL+@+ALT+AppleKey+xyz.

If it's not something you'd try, what would you try?

On non-Apple-systems, typically you can try the right mouse button or browsing the menus.

My phone didn't come with a mouse.

I understand, however, maybe then there have to be some buttons. Anything but a random thing to do.

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