Paginate My Web Pages -- Please? | Hacker News Reader

Paginate My Web Pages -- Please?

designbygravity.wordpress.com

4 pointscschanck4 comments

I view pagination as a limitation of books, not as a feature. I can read something much faster by scrolling (although I greatly prefer reading on paper). It also makes it so that if part of the "page" is obscured, that's ok, because you can just scroll around it. You may be sitting comfortably at an angle that makes it difficult to see the bottom of the screen, but with scrolling this is no problem. I'd much rather read near the top of my screen than the bottom. I put insane amounts of bottom padding on all local HTML pages I create for documentation for precisely this reason.

I'd be interested to see a book on a spool so you could scroll it. It might be found to be more enjoyable.

I think the ideal reading environment would be an infinite vertical space with a minimap (see Sublime Text) rather than a scrollbar. It gives you a great sense of where you are in the document and it's a much more reasonably-sized click target.

As a web designer the idea of this terrifies me. Imagine having to hand code corrections for all the different interpretations of this 'feature'.

I like the idea of improving the tactility of the internet. But I'm afraid that I don't trust the browser industry to get something like this right.

I agree in the sense that any implementation would have to be soft enough not to be disruptive. But the challenge doesn't seem quite that hard. Web designers are, IMHO, way too concerned with controlling the precise presentation of their pages; when users have outlandish hardware, strange fonts or such, things break spectacularly.

There has always been a strange disconnect in the way vertical scrolling is the prime interface element in our interactions with web pages. For all that many of the ideas in our user interfaces are mirrors of real world paradigms, the unbound vertical scrolling window is pretty odd. I don’t seem to encounter that construct much in the real world — do you?

No, because the real world has physical limitations that don't exist in an infinitely scrollable viewport. We should be exploiting the features/lack-of-limitations/different-limitations in different kinds of mediums, not translating the limitations artificially to them because of some sense of nostalgic aesthetic.

The commonness of vertical scrolling may be a side effect of Latin languages where we read left-to-right top-to-bottom. You even see this in the way things like newspapers are laid out: the amount of space is measured in column inches, the width available is largely fixed. I'd like to think that languages that read top-to-bottom left-to-right would feature significant horizontal scrolling on web pages and by computers (I don't know offhand if they do). I find horizontal scrolling, especially on "artsy" pages where the artist is making some lame attempt to get the viewer to think about things differently, jarring. The product comparison on the Logitech website ( http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/ ) is a retail example of this. It's just slightly not obvious enough to be disconcerting when first trying to figure out the navigation. And we all know that both horizontal and vertical scrolling on the same page is really difficult to navigate (although, a grabber-hand method of scrolling is a reasonable way to implement that, but how many browsers and non-Adobe products provide that?).

I also wonder how Fitt's Law fits into this. I definitely find horizontal movement of the mouse, toward the vertical scrollbar at the side of the window, easier to control than vertical movement to the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the window -- I also pivot from my elbow and wrist easier than I do from having to lift up my arm to make significant vertical movement of the mouse. That is, the narrowness of the vertical scrollbar is easier to hit than the height of the horizontal scrollbar, even though they are the same size in their respective directions (14px in Chromium on Linux). Same applies with finger movements for the mouse wheel: my fingers move more easily in the up-down direction that controls the vertical scroll than it does in the left-right movement needed to get horizontal movement with those mice that have side-to-side action on the wheel (in fact, I'm looking for a full-sized wireless mouse that doesn't have that, they are getting to be hard to find). Different x-axis and y-axis pointer acceleration may help to counteract that, but being able to configure that is rare.

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