This is also a problem with intra-page links to named anchors - usually browsers scroll the page so that the anchor is at the top of the window, but this does not happen if the anchor is near the bottom of the page. Very confusing.
Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#12Couldn't you dynamically add padding to a footer element based on the view port size, resulting in sufficient "whitespace" under your content for the browser to render as you continue to scroll?
Sure, but then it makes the scroll bar position inaccurate. The whitespace needs to go beyond the end of the scroll bar.
Does it? If you can scroll further with the keyboard than the scrollbar can indicate, that would also make the scrollbar inaccurate. Perhaps instead we could add an indicator to the scrollbar (ala Chrome's text search indicators) that shows where the content actually ends.
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#13From the comments: This problem has been around forever, but there is a new problem that makes scrolling even worse than before. Sites which have headers or footers that have a fixed position with respect to the browser viewport completely break scrolling because when you scroll, neither the red nor the green line are visible. The green line is under the navigation junk at the top of the page.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I find any fixed elements on a scrolling page distracting. My brain expects the whole page to move when scrolling yet my eyes are drawn to this bit that is stuck in place.
Also these fixed elements tend to be horizontal bars across the top or bottom of the page, reducing my reading area. That also sucks, especially since all laptop manufacturers decided we all should have super-widescreen displays.
EDIT: Apologies, I didn't see steve-howard's post which essentially says the same thing.
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#14This seems like a piddling thing that belongs no where in the realm of the browser. This seems to be just about hitting page down. Which 99% of users don't do. They swipe, mouse wheel, my mom even clicks and drags the scroll bar. And for the 1% of you that this drives insane make a plugin that adds something like this to all your pages. As for anchor links you could easily add extra padding dynamically.
body{ padding-bottom:1200px; } /* rolls eyes */
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#15Safari in iOS handles this nicely. You can scroll below the bottom of the page and the default grey background _behind_ the page becomes visible. Desktop browsers could also do this.
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#16I agree it would be great in theory... but in practice there's a HUGE problem that the author doesn't seem to have considered: many webpages have footers.
I'm talking about normally-positioned footers, not fixed-position ones.
You're not supposed to scroll beyond a footer. It would look terrible. And you don't want to put extra space between the content and the footer either, or have that space vary. (How would you even know)
So while this works great in word-processors, code editors, etc., unfortunately there's just no way to do it in browsers. Literally no way to implement it, even if the browser-makers wanted to.
An aside: it would be great if browsers somehow calculated fixed-position headers/footers and took them into account when calculating scroll distance for space-bar-scrolling...
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#17From the comments: This problem has been around forever, but there is a new problem that makes scrolling even worse than before. Sites which have headers or footers that have a fixed position with respect to the browser viewport completely break scrolling because when you scroll, neither the red nor the green line are visible. The green line is under the navigation junk at the top of the page.
Incidentally, I notice that almost none of the sites worth reading have such features.
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#18From the comments: This problem has been around forever, but there is a new problem that makes scrolling even worse than before. Sites which have headers or footers that have a fixed position with respect to the browser viewport completely break scrolling because when you scroll, neither the red nor the green line are visible. The green line is under the navigation junk at the top of the page.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I find any fixed elements on a scrolling page distracting. My brain expects the whole page to move when scrolling yet my eyes are drawn to this bit that is stuck in place. Also these fixed elements tend to be horizontal bars across the top or bottom of the page, reducing my reading area. That also sucks, especially since all laptop manufacturers decided we all should have super-widescre…
I bet you hated framesets on the web when they were around.
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but then it makes the scroll bar position inaccurate. The whitespace needs to go beyond the end of the scroll bar.
Does it? If you can scroll further with the keyboard than the scrollbar can indicate, that would also make the scrollbar inaccurate. Perhaps instead we could add an indicator to the scrollbar (ala Chrome's text search indicators) that shows where the content actually ends.
Why not just make the scrollbar take the extra whitespace into account as if it's part of the webpage?
This is exactly what Scintilla (editing component) does if you enable that feature.
Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
#20Chrome 15 solved / worked around this problem by smooth scrolling whenever you page up/down. Without the instant jump, the eye can easy tell where the page is compared to where it was before.