

Paginate My Web Pages -- Please? - cschanck
http://designbygravity.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/paginate-my-web-pages-please/

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DanielStraight
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.

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joshuarr
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.

~~~
cschanck
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.

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thwarted
_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.

