Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#51

Post by estel »

steve-howard wrote: post #10
hammock wrote: post #2

From 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.

I find that in general, any fixed-position elements in a page are distracting. The Web news article has long been styled after actual news articles. So when the page stops acting anything like a real paper page (more than just animated ads, I'm talking about big pictures and nav bars that follow you all over the page), I have a lot of trouble reading. The NY Post is particularly bad.

Adapting to the advantages of a dynamic medium is definitely not something I'll ever see as a negative for a website in itself.

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#52

Post by Too »

prawn wrote: post #26
JonahBraun wrote: post #15

Safari 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.

Then it snaps back though, right? Rendering it a bit useless.

No, it's not useless because it gives a visual indicator that hey, something different happened. And besides, both the scroll and especially the return is animated which will let your eye follow the line where you should keep reading.

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#53

Post by joshfraser »

The big assumption here is that most people use the space bar to jump one page at a time while reading. For me, I typically scroll through the page a little at a time and follow along while I read. I'd be curious to know which approach is most common. I guess it wouldn't actually be that hard to collect.

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#54

Post by Angostura »

ars wrote: post #27
scott_s wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never have this problem because I scroll continuously with the touchpad. Before I had access to a touchpad, I scrolled continuously with the mouse wheel.

I think it may be a mac thing, since I've never seen a mac with a scroll wheel (although I'm sure they exist).

Both the Mighty Mouse and the Magic Mouse have scrollwheel analogues.

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#55

Post by JimDabell »

ars wrote: post #27
scott_s wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never have this problem because I scroll continuously with the touchpad. Before I had access to a touchpad, I scrolled continuously with the mouse wheel.

I think it may be a mac thing, since I've never seen a mac with a scroll wheel (although I'm sure they exist).

Every Mac shipped with a mouse in the past 6 years has had a continuous scrolling mechanism built into the mouse. First with the Mighty Mouse, which had a scroll ball, and then with the Magic Mouse, which you can scroll directly on the surface of the mouse.

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#56

Post by losvedir »

jaylevitt wrote: post #37
losvedir wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having used Sublime Text for a while (which does what the article suggests and shows you as much white space as is needed to keep the display consistent) Really? Was there some sort of option you turned on? I'm a happy ST2 user (bought my license a couple weeks ago), but that's been one issue I've had lately. I can't seem to scroll past the bottom of the page. For now I've just been typing with my cursor at the bot…

Add "scroll_past_end": true to both your File settings and your User settings.

Ahhhh, works beautifully. Thanks so much!!!

Re: Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

#57

Post by crazygringo »

pilgrim689 wrote: post #47
derefr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was sort of making an implicit suggestion there—that maybe the over-scroll region, if implemented as Safari does it, doesn't look all that bad at all.

It looks good! And the user won't mistakenly think that the web developer messed up on his footer design. The distinction between the website and what the browser is doing is clear by the relative depth positioning.

That's true. I was just imagining blank white space which would look terrible in many layouts... but with the depth and texture, that could be a solution.

Related problem: shift+scrolling up... are we going to go above the top of the page?

Post reply on HN