Don't reinvent the scrollbar

http://bbrks.me/blog/reinventing-scrollbars/

by bbrks • 13 years ago

348 167 13 years ago

bbrks.me

clone1018• 13 years ago

A guy makes a fun little feature for his blog and gets an entire write up on how he's doing it wrong. Awesome.

bbrks4• 13 years ago

Wasn't meant as a direct dig at anyone, just making my observations :)

thoughtpalette• 13 years ago

Well from a UX perspective, it was a great write-up.

pwhython• 13 years ago

Just an observation from me: You make it hard to find a link back to your main blog.

bluetidepro• 13 years ago

"Simply hide all of the content which is not the article until the user reaches it. ... “But how do you implement this” you ask? Easy. (Be warned though, this code is untested!)"

First off, I wouldn't call that "Easy" code, or an "Easy" solution if that it is untested? More like a hypotheses. Secondly, I don't think that is a good alternative solution at all. That seems like a very messy way to handle the indication by changing the size of the scrollbar based on user triggered events.

While there are some decent points in this article (such as not splitting up your content into pages for ads), I think it still doesn't do a good job of defending why the top vertical bar for progress indication is bad. Nor does it give a good alternative.

And, as clone1018 pointed out in another comment, I don't think the indication feature was meant to be this ground-breaking UX feature or anything. I think it's more of some eye-candy for his blog.

I would be much more interested in a counter argument article on using the top horizontal bar for loading purposes (like YouTube does), since that is becoming more of a common UX feature.

pyrocat• 13 years ago

First off, I wouldn't call that "Easy" code, or an "Easy" solution if that it is untested? More like a hypotheses. Secondly, I don't think that is a good alternative solution at all. That seems like a very messy way to handle the indication by changing the size of the scrollbar based on user triggered events.

It's not exactly untested, there are lots of sites that wait to load in comments via AJAX until the user has scrolled down to the comment section. Many simply hide comments until the user clicks "show comments". Both are valid alternate solutions to the initial counterpoint ("what about the comments section!!!").

X-Cubed• 13 years ago

You seem to be conflating two different discussions.

The OP is not talking about the progress bar as an indicator of page loading, like the other discussions on HN recently. Instead, he was mentioning someone's suggestion that it be used like a scroll bar to mimic the progress of scrolling down the page.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Yeah, Redfin does something similar, but we all know that Twitter and the endless-page killed the scrollbar as a useful meter.

zeppelinnn• 13 years ago

I personally like apple's recent approach to the scrollbar. Hiding it when not in use minimizes distraction. It's very easy to tell how long a single content page article is without needing the scrollbar to persist on the window.

pigscantfly• 13 years ago

My one issue with the latest Apple scrollbar is that I've yet to figure out a convenient way to scroll horizontally. The horizontal scrollbar is almost always hidden, I can't use my mouse wheel to bring it up, and using arrow keys doesn't always work either.

If anyone has a suggestion, shoot. I went so far as looking for a hotkey for toggling scrollbar display (which I still think would be a good idea), but couldn't find anything. For the record, I'm using Synergy to control mouse/keyboard from a Ubuntu box with a MBP slave machine.

Adirael• 13 years ago

It's a bit of a pain, the only way I found to do it is using a Magic Mouse or a trackpad. I'll be back here in case someone has a suggestion :)

mietek3• 13 years ago

When I move my mouse wheel, both scrollbars show up, if the window is horizontally scrollable at the moment.

Horizontal scrolling with the mouse wheel is done by moving the mouse wheel with the shift key down.

Note that just touching the trackpad with two fingers, as if you're about to scroll, also brings up both scrollbars.

wonderyak• 13 years ago

Even worse is trying to click on a file or folder that is last in the window in 'file list' view. You have to wait for the horizontal scrollbar to disappear in order to interact with the last item.

Very frustrating.

gkoberger• 13 years ago

While I hate that Apple hides the scrollbar when not in use for the main page, the new iOS-inspired scrollbar looks much nicer when designing scrolling divs inside the page.

[Note: never said anything about custom scrollbars; just that websites with scrolling divs tend to look better on OSX]

mietek3• 13 years ago

If you hate that your scrollbar is hidden when not in use, you can go to System Preferences / General and change the "Show scroll bars" setting to "Always".

If you hate that my scrollbar is hidden when not in use, well, tough luck. I like it this way.

If you force yet another custom, badly-implemented, weirdly-behaving, not-entirely-thought-through scrollbar on me, I will hate you and never visit your website again.

colmvp• 13 years ago

"If you force yet another custom, badly-implemented, weirdly-behaving, not-entirely-thought-through scrollbar on me, I will hate you and never visit your website again."

Pretty sure Gmail uses custom scrollbars and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most commonly used e-mail in the world.

I think Facebook also uses a custom scrollbar on their activity feed.

Same with Rdio's web app and Spotify's web app (unless it looks different on PC?)

freejack• 13 years ago

Are you a mouse user or do you use a touchpad? I have a theory that the new OSX scrollbars only really work for touchpad users and everyone with a mouse hates them ;)

UntitledNo4• 13 years ago

I'm a Mac user using a mouse and I love them, sorry.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

As a programmer, I once thought there should be best GUI elements that people discover and then leave alone.

But then I realized that book and magazine publishers have been "reinventing the page number" since before there was a web.

Of course information designer will be reinventing the elements of the UI. The process of design is making form and content a unified whole.

valtron• 13 years ago

“But how do you implement this” you ask? Easy. (Be warned though, this code is untested!)

Scrollbar within a scrollbar!

    <div style="height: 100%; overflow-y: auto">
      Content
    </div>
    <div id="comments">...</div>

mietek3• 13 years ago

I was nodding along, when suddenly...

One alternative is to ignore iOS and OS X users. But that’s not very nice. There are many scrolling libraries available that you can use, such as NiceScroll.
Or you can just make your own indicator like the one seen at the very start of the article. Just don’t use a horizontal indicator for vertical progression :)

No! Do not do this. Just stop. Stop reinventing and reimplementing the scrollbar.

bhauer5• 13 years ago

Agreed. Not to put to fine a point on it, but if your user is on iOS or OS X, they are accustomed to losing sight of their progress because, as the article says, "Apple knows best."

Going out of your way as a content author to correct for the user interface quirks of the reader's preferred reading environment seems extraordinary and unnecessary.

Presumably a non-trivial number of iOS and OS X users actually like the fact that scrollbars are hidden from view while reading and it may have been a factor (a small one, admittedly) in their decision process.

I agree with the OP in large measure.

jfb2• 13 years ago

"Going out of your way as a content author to correct for the user interface quirks of the reader's preferred reading environment seems extraordinary and unnecessary."

I would actually say that it's outright user hostile to do this sort of garbage.

TheZenPsycho18• 13 years ago

It's my preferred reading environment, but I hate that apple made this decision, because, as my sibling commenter here noted, it's outright user hostile. Apple never really totally understood the "visibility" requirement of usable interfaces. They like to hide things to make them look pretty, and it only leads to better advertising, not better interfaces.

Thankfully there's still a setting to always show scrollbars. For now.

Camillo• 13 years ago

I like having the scrollbars hidden. If I want to see my progress, I just put two fingers on my trackpad.

super_mario• 13 years ago

I would go even further and say that the lack of scroll bar in OS X has lead to lower uptake of read material.

Here is what scroll bar does for me:

1. It gives me instant feedback about the size of the document (the shorter the scrollbar the bigger the document).

2. It shows me rough position in the document.

3. Provides reading context (I'm 35% into the document and I'm reading on subject X) which aids memorizing the material.

I'm a mathematician and numbers are my thing. Some people use number memorizing technique where they walk through a familiar place and assign numbers to landmarks. And to recall numbers they walk the route again in their head and "read" the numbers off the landmarks. This is the technique those freaks that can recite thousands and thousand of decimals of Pi use.

In effect the scroll bar does the same for me. It's my landmark and I assign topics to its position which allows me to remember better. If I want to quickly re-read something weeks later I can open the document and within seconds get there just by scroll bar position. And one could say search would work here too, but often times it does not because I don't remember exactly the string I want to find in the document (and some documents are not searchable).

Once I upgraded to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard, I found the default scroll bar setting extremely bothersome and my read content retention much much lower until I put the scroll bars back.

So another anecdotal reason why dynamically showing/hiding UI elements is usually a bad idea.

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

I use the default scroll bars setting in OS X (Show scrollbars automatically based on mouse or trackpad movement), and I'm never not aware of the page length.

I see it whenever I switch tabs, and I see it whenever I start to scroll. I always have an idea of how long the page is and I don't need a constant reminder of it. It's not like it's a precision instrument anyway - who can precisely gauge the length of an article based on scroll bar length and current window size? Rain Man?

I can switch back to the always-on behavior if I want to, but I haven't wanted to.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

Agreed! OS X users can choose when to show a scrollbar: it's one of the 'General' system preferences.

Reimplementing the scrollbar for users who have not taken the option to show the scrollbar is deliberately going against their stated preference.

Semaphor3• 13 years ago

Reimplementing the scrollbar for users who have not taken the option to show the scrollbar is deliberately going against their stated preference.

While in general I agree with your post, I think saying it goes "against their stated preferences" is a bit strong considering that (from what I've read here) not showing the scrollbar is the default. In my experience many people never change the defaults.

mattstocum3• 13 years ago

Especially since NiceScroll isn't very nice. The scrolling is jerky. Leave the OS defaults for scrolling. On OS X, there is an option to keep the scrollbar always visible, and the OS itself decides to do this if you don't have an input device capable of scrolling. Some janky 3rd party scroll library isn't going to know any of this information.

Semaphor3• 13 years ago

Especially since NiceScroll isn't very nice. The scrolling is jerky.

Interesting, on what devices? We are using NiceScroll for a widget right now and it's very smooth, even on my Nexus 4.

zalew• 13 years ago

Have you tried 'position: fixed' on mobile? Position fixed support is a mess across mobile webkit browsers, and last time I checked the most bulletproof way to implement it was still to put the content in a scrollable container - that's the point of jquery libs like iscroll/nicescroll that try to emulate native scrollbars.

sitharus• 13 years ago

Completely agree. I constantly have this fight with designers, disappearing scrollbars may not be (and I don't think it is) the best experience, but it is the system experience. It's far easier to explain to a casual user that on OS X you have to touch the trackpad to see the scroll position in all apps rather then "except that app that uses its own scrollbars that don't quite work right".

zobzu2• 13 years ago

As unpopular as it might be I think he's got a point about this too. it's just that it's not very clearly articulated.

At the end of the day, customers and others browsing your site are unlikely to understand why there's no visual indication on their mac, and why you didn't put one on your site.Sooo.. if you're forced to put a visual indicator, at the very least least, make it vertical for page scrolling.

(and also, thanks for nothing, Apple UI)

drzaiusapelord• 13 years ago

They either need to learn how to use their macs or switch to Windows. Fixing ignorant OSX users expectations isn't and shouldn't be a webdev's problem.

Yaggo• 13 years ago

Totally agree. Here the author (of the original post) contradicts himself. Users of OS X have chosen to use a UI with tiny hiding scrollbars and likely are accustomed for that. Let the browser natively handle the scrollbars, any custom hack may cause usability/technical/performance problems on certain platforms sooner or later.

helloTree• 13 years ago

Omg, some people have strange problems ... If you want to know how far you are you just look where the scroll bar is now, scroll down until the end (or comments) sections and then you can estimate how far that is.

I do it that way and I have seen many people who do it the same. However I agree, that pages are bullshit in a web context.

swah• 13 years ago

Careful not to read this too fast: I thought it was criticizing http://ricostacruz.com/nprogress/ but it's not.

robmclarty• 13 years ago

Yeah I went a little too fast myself and so, started reading the comments because I was confused. I thought the loading progress bar was actually a good thing and a UX improvement when waiting for heavy pages to load.

Regarding using such a bar as an indicator of page-scroll progress, I'm indifferent. It's not intrusive, so if I don't care for it, it doesn't bother me. For those who do care for it, I think the horizontal positioning is easier to gauge page-scroll progress because looking up is easier than looking all the way over to the right of my viewport (I never look over there because I use a scroll-wheel or touchpad to do the scrolling ;)

digitalpacman• 13 years ago

Most mobile friendly articles are split across multiple pages to reduce the page size.

driverdan• 13 years ago

Which is a terrible way of doing it. Unless the page is heavy on images loading all the text at once will be far faster and easier than splitting it up.

Plus there's really no reason split them up. It's not a book, there's no limit on page length.

mattstocum3• 13 years ago

That's a terrible idea. Latency is your biggest concern on mobile, not bandwidth.

felipeko• 13 years ago

I'm not sure i agree. I'm used to reading horizontally and usually i scroll enough so the content i'm reading is always at the top of the page. So it was much faster, and looked more natural, for me to check my progress on the reading on the page that had the horizontal progress than it is on the vertical scrollbar.

bluthru• 13 years ago

I hate Google News's custom scrollbar so, so much. I love how OS X hides the scrollbar when I don't need it, but Google thinks it knows better.

nobodysfool• 13 years ago

I hate the Google News custom scrollbar also, but I don't want my scrollbar to hide, let my browser present the scrollbar, or better yet, my OS. Don't give me something new just because you don't like the look of the scrollbars on your page. Deal with it.

warfangle• 13 years ago

The worst reinvention of the scrollbar was Google Wave.

Shudder.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

I told myself over and over that I must be stupid, because Those People Know What They're Doing even though it didn't make a lick of sense to me. Being wrong never felt so right, or something. What a strange application that was.

Leftium• 13 years ago

I'd love a scrollbar that displays which part is the actual article, and which part is the comments following it. Often the comments are much longer than the article, so it's difficult to gauge how much of the article is left.

hyperplane• 13 years ago

Maybe there are better ways of monetising than forcing multiple pages of ads down your users throats? :)

Kill the CPM model and your wish will come true. Unfortunately, advertisers often first ask "Well how many pageviews does your <site/app/whatever> have?" Most advertising metrics are still stuck 10 years behind where we are and where we're going.

eksith• 13 years ago

  An article shouldn’t be split across multiple pages on the web! 
  We have an infinitely long canvas to write on, along with an elegant 
  way of moving through it. Why would you need to split it up?"

Well, there are some times you would want to break up a long article. E.G. A tutorial that can touch on multiple steps can be helped with multiple pages. An alternative would be to provide in-page anchors and a contents list a la Wikipedia. This way you can link to or bookmark a particular step easily.

rits• 13 years ago

Also some times you can't read long article on your phone because its too long to fit in phone memory. For ex try to view html 5 single page spec[1] on your phone, especialy if your phone not 8 cores 2GB mem device.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/single-page.html

PStamatiou• 13 years ago

though the difference from scroll bar to the article indicator on my site is i set mine to only the length of the article not the page, so long comments sections/footers dont contribute to your progress.

t4nkd• 13 years ago

But Ben! What happens when spiders crawl your site and can't find comment content?

roryokane3• 13 years ago

Spiders should see the comments if you hide the comments with JS on page load instead of in the default CSS.

gus_massa• 13 years ago

I'm not sure, but Google could be unhappy with that. It'll look like you are trying to put a lot of keywords for the crawler that the users don't see and may classify the site as spammy.

jonlarson• 13 years ago

I'm sure this has been talked about before, but I think the ideal of what a scroll bar should try to impress on the user is that it is a shading, representing the area they currently see, over the entire bar, representing the entire length of the page. Basically similar to what Sublime does, showing you a zoomed out view of the text with a shading over the section you currently see. http://i.stack.imgur.com/UeGnE.png

Obviously, this is pretty much how the size of the bar is calculated already, but few designs actually translate it very well. That's what really struck me about the iOS and OS X Lion scroll bars over the others he showed. They really do a much better job at actually conveying this to the user, or at least, they did for me. Ubuntu's terminal scrollbar is also similar in this regard. It would be awesome to see default designs start to focus on this in the future.

chenglou2• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who really appreciate OS X's disappearing scroll bar? Leaves the content alone and works well for overflowing divs on pages. And if you really want to take a peak at where you are, just… you know, two finger touch the trackpad. Good thing people aren't dragging the scroll bar anymore too.

pothibo• 13 years ago

Hell no you're not. Anytime I see a windows box I immediately notice how ugly and useless is their scrollbar.

I love how OS X/iOS scroll bar disappear. You know from the content you are reading where you are on the page. It's very, very rare (probably never) that I am lost on a page and I have to scroll slightly up/down to know where I am.

sigmaml• 13 years ago

Requiring the user to touch the trackpad (with two fingers, at that) just to know the relative position in the page is an inconvenience, at least to some.

Also, isn't the scroll bar really useful when you need to scroll up and down the page quickly by an arbitrary amount?

chenglou2• 13 years ago

It's an inconvenience for a (in my opinion) tiny problem. The pros far outweight the cons.

I expected someone asking about scrolling an arbitrary amount. After all these years of reading internet articles and pdf manuals on Mac/iOS, I've rarely ever encountered a case where clicking the position on the scroll bar beats the speed of flickering the trackpad (and that's even excluding the precision). In fact, there's rarely an internet page where I can't get to the end within one flick.

http://www.theverge.com <- this is one flick

(While we're at it, yes, you can still drag OS X's scroll bar if you really want to. I've used it for pdf manuals).

shurcooL• 13 years ago

I really like OS X's hiding scroll bars. Whenever I scroll, it appears in my peripheral vision and gives me an indicator of progress. Then it disappears when I don't need it.

It's likely things can be improved further, but IMO this is a better starting point than what we had before.

itg• 13 years ago

You can change it in system preferences -> general

andyfleming• 13 years ago

I personally prefer the way iA.net does it (with an indicator next to the scrollbar):

http://ia.net/blog/learning-to-see/

mrtron• 13 years ago

  > Maybe there are better ways of monetising than forcing            
  >multiple pages of ads down your users throats? :)

If only life were so black and white.

zobzu2• 13 years ago

Yeah according to advertisers, ads save lifes after all! (AMBER)

LowKarmaAccount• 13 years ago

There have been improvements to scroll bars; they just haven't really gained widespread acceptance.

On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x height your mouse was is. You could then click to tell the OS that you wanted to wanted to reflow the page using that x height as a reference point. If you pointed your mouse at the horizontal scroll bar, a vertical line appeared, and you could scroll left to right. This is sort of like pressing Control-l on Emacs. Instead scrolling and getting the desired result by trial and error, you could tell the OS exactly what you wanted to do. It was very useful for scrolling within pictures.

You can see a video of this here [1] at 46:50.

[1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932

p9idf• 13 years ago

Oberon does exactly this. X and Plan 9 do so as well, but without the markers.

lowglow• 13 years ago

Reinvent everything. Break the rules. Be better. Explore. Fail. Explore until you're so far out in left field, everyone every where else is looking to you to lead them.

eagsalazar22• 13 years ago

Two assumptions:

* horizontal progress for vertical content is bad

* infinite scroll is better than pages/tabs/whatever

Just saying "poor natural mapping" doesn't mean horizontal progress is wrong and just saying "why would you" doesn't make pages wrong.

I'd like to see data to support those assumptions. On infinite scroll I'd bet horizontal progress has minuscule negative impact on usability vs vertical progress. On paged I bet it performs just as well.

And regarding pages vs infinite scroll, I bet pages actually perform much better. Infinite scroll is elegant for us, the developers, but for users it presents a dramatic increase in cognitive load to constantly be orienting yourself in this infinite space with hints of often unrelated content above and below. With lots of content, infinite scroll actually encourages people to scroll which is usually the last thing you actually should do. If the primary means of navigation is via a navigation menu (aka the content needs to be organized, not an article), then why the hell would you dump all the output into one giant bucket of content?

roryokane3• 13 years ago

As for “horizontal progress for vertical content is bad”, I’m pretty sure that’s right, but that’s mainly relying on my intuition. If I think about the concept and scroll my page up and down while imagining a horizontal scroll bar, my mind just rebels and thinks “this is not right”. It’s just obvious to me that a scroll bar should be vertical when you scroll vertically.

I can also offer some reasoning: when the scroll bar is vertical, it moves in the same direction as the direction of your scrolling movement on the mouse. This makes it easier to mentally connect your fingers’ scrolling movement to the scrolling on the screen, which makes the device use easier and more intuitive. In the case of iOS and OS X 10.7 and later, your finger movement is in the same direction as the content rather than the scroll bar, but it’s still something on the screen moving with your fingers. But a horizontal scroll bar moving when you push your fingers vertically is too abstract a concept for your mind to intuitively grasp, so it’s harder to use.

eagsalazar22• 13 years ago

I get 100% why it seem like it should matter I just don't buy that it actually does matter (much). http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-.... That article is a great example of how completely wrong our intuition can be when it comes to optimizing conversions and I think the same applies to usability.

chris_wot• 13 years ago

You think that's bad? Gnome 3 removed single line scrolling by removing the up and down arrows "because nobody would need that".

Unity is even worse, with its overlay scrollbars.

mintplant• 13 years ago

I feel like I'm the only one in the world who actually likes overlay scrollbars on Linux. They give me the ability to easily scroll the terminal when I need to, without wasting space during the majority of the time that I don't.

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

I don't know... Reinventing the scrollbar can be fun: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-introducing-th...

matmann2001• 13 years ago

Was I the only one expecting a comments section to appear once I reached the bottom?

shadowOfShadow• 13 years ago

I dislike scrolling. I dislike scrollbars. All.

Re-imagine content. Eliminate scrolling. Keep content represented on the screen. Elegent, progressively granular navigation on the screen.

I love when a scrollbar handle thins to represent the proportion of content on the screen and shits the usability bed.

You have only so many words left to say or type. Use less. Live/Say more. Condense information to fit the medium. Lose you paradigm.

Writers are paid by the word and we pay by the byte. Writers shit the net. Don't waste my life with words. Get to the point. We're dying here.

roryokane3• 13 years ago

Perhaps many apps would benefit from this, but there are some cases where content has to be larger than the screen. This includes high-resolution images whose details you want to inspect (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Singer_Sargent_-_Mrs....), and books on websites such as http://www.talesofmu.com/story/ and https://www.fanfiction.net/.

In the case of an image, the ways of seeing different parts of the image I can think of are zooming in and out, scrolling with scroll bars, or paginating the image. I think allowing both zooming and scrolling is the best interface in that case. So scrolling is sometimes necessary, and should not be abolished.

James_Duval• 13 years ago

Writers aren't typically paid by the word.

dagw• 13 years ago

I don't know about 'typically', but it isn't uncommon among freelancer writers.

jarnix• 13 years ago

It reminds me of the volume control in iPad some time ago, it was horizontal under the movie, it looked like the time bar.

onedev• 13 years ago

OSX/iOS hiding the scrollbar is not that big of a deal. You can tap the trackpad/touchscreen to get it to re-appear again so you know how far along the page you are when you need to.

It's not a problem that needs solving. OSX/iOS users are very used to this and it is second nature.

telepoiss• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who actually likes this approach of having horizontal progress-bar on articles? Its not a scrollbar as it fills up from the left rather than moving a small block across the screen. Living here in Northern Europe I've always read left to right and counting percentages 0>100 seems more natural to visualize left>right rather than top>down.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

Kind of a tangent but it drives me nuts when websites not only reinvent the scrollbar, but also the actual mechanisms of scrolling. Every time I go to a blog post on Medium and press space to go down a page and it does nothing it triggers a disproportionate amount of frustration.

andyhmltn• 13 years ago

We don’t need page numbers on the web

There are some very good use cases for pagination. Granted, you shouldn't be using it on an article but if you're browsing 500+ records its a lot easier to paginate them than it is to have the user come back later and have to scroll to where they were before.

rockfort• 13 years ago

Nice usability article on a site, where I can't find any button to go to the main blog.

AndyKelley• 13 years ago

Nice ad hominem.

It looks like there is not a "main blog" page to go to.

gotschi• 13 years ago

This may be all true, theres nothing I can say against this article, but there's really a reason to split an article or comments section to multiple pages - battery performance. On heavy ad-based sites with flash content etc, the page rendering can get really cpu intensive - at least on smartphones and tablets.. (I'm referring to a 30000x1024 pixels to scroll through. OSX sometimes really fights with them and smooth scrolling (i have a retina macbook, maybe thats the reason, macericks should bring some improvements to that...) on ios can get laggy. Tumblr pages with infinite scrolling and heavy imagery are an example for that. Nice article though!

alcoolsands• 13 years ago

Long live the scroll bar! I'm a personal fan but I think it really all does come down to personal preference. However, this could be "old man" syndrome. Am I the only one that thinks they should bring the joystick back?

CodeCube• 13 years ago

Maybe there are better ways of monetising than forcing multiple pages of ads down your users throats? :)

If you decide that you want to show multiple ads, just intersperse them throughout the content. Break it up and insert them in between some of the paragraphs

Too• 13 years ago

Knowing where the comments start could be solved with a highlighted scrollbar. Such as are common in programming IDE's, Eclipse for example puts one color where every TODO is and another color for mark occurances etc. Just put a colored marking or a small arrow even at the scrollbar-position where the comments start.

Or why not put one at each heading of the page.

Implementing this accurately on a web page with js is a bit tricky since most browsers display progress bars differently. The biggest problem is if it has tiny arrows at both ends or only on one side. You will get a few pixels off if you try to match the native scroll bar. Another option is to put a second scroll bar next to the native one that is annotated, I've found this to be the most reliable option.

An API from the browser to get help from the native scroll bar, or to enhance the native scroll bar would be great.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I had a client in the telecom industry some years ago who had a project that was re-writing built in scroll bar technology because a few of the execs didn't like the scroll bars available in Windows.

Needless to say the project was years behind. I'm glad I never got too close to it.

jingadjanga• 13 years ago

I like the meta display of your own article with the scrollbar! I also love the "5 minute read" at the top. I hope that's autogenerated from a word count, cause that would be awesome!

tdebroc• 13 years ago

It sounds a great solution also for SEO optimisation. Hidden comments won't be indexed or badly indexed, right ? And generally, we don't want texts of comments to spoil/rot too much the words indexed in the article. However sometimes we might want to let some comments, especially the most appreciated, it should give meaning to the text above. So maybe you could add "leave the best 2 or 3 comments below the article"

Don't reinvent the scrollbar

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