Scrollbars are becoming a problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#221

Post by fritzo » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:26 AM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #39

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #3

Whenever I read a piece like this or another UX blog, it just becomes so obvious how little we care about a11y. “Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.

It’s not exactly wrong from a business standpoint. The math just comes out that a business does better when they do all the things they can’t do if they want an accessible website. Dark patterns, especially, are very anti-accessibility. It’s why we need laws to mandate accessibility.

Laws to mandate accessibility, laws to mandate provable correctness, laws to mandate fairness, and laws to break up the big, for only the big could satisfy all the other laws.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#222

Post by masswerk » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:26 AM UTC

syldarion wrote: post #198

masswerk wrote: post #137

Regarding minimaps: I thought, these were great, too, but then I discovered that I find them rather irritating and that I actually don't use them. I guess, this is, because you have to maintain a mental mapping of that document and how it is organized, already, for the minimap to make sense. But, then, referring to that visual mapping of what you're already mapping in a much more abstract sense, seems – at least for…

Agreed. Once a file/page reaches a certain size, I find minimaps to be a mostly unintelligible blob. Maybe it'd be solved by just making it bigger, but then we push into the problems of screen real estate and what not.

I think, it's also, instead of just approximating the position in the document, we now feel compelled to translate our mental image to a visual one and to match this with the rendering in the minimap. Which introduces an additional step of dis-abstraction, and what is essentially abstract (text) now has to be treated like a material object, as well. Moreover, if the overall structure isn't as varied as it may be the case with code, it doesn't provide much significance, anyways.

(It may depend on where you're located on the aphantasia to photographic memory continuum, though. I'm definitely closer to the former than to the latter extreme.)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#223

Post by pseudalopex » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #207

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

Win95 default was peak Windows UI for me. It had proper shading so you can see the window edges. Min/max/close buttons were high contrast and easy to see, and were big enough to easily click. Window titles were high contrast and clear. The UI was light and snappy unlike XP’s.

What was worse in Windows 98? Or Windows 2000?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#224

Post by syldarion » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #203

syldarion wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's negligible these days, but there's also the concern of an increased graphics load since you'll have to do an extra pass for the transparency. But I don't want to dive too far into the mindset of "everything must be optimized to the max".

Computers are very fast. GPUs are way faster than you think. Of course, it doesn't feel like that way since all the abstractions and layers kill performance by a thousand cuts. Remember, "Aero" was a thing almost 20 years ago and that was a graphically intensive window renderer at that time. Nowadays we could have 50x better effects without a problem but UI designers are not willing to.

Oh for sure, I'm with you. Old graphics work has this mindset of avoiding transparency passes stuck in my head. Certainly a small part of the bigger problem.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#225

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

cwillu wrote: post #187

jchw wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment. That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades,…

If you haven't already, look at xfce.

using KDE Plasma, which isn't bad, and is configurable enough :)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#226

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #202

lstamour wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable (until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack). Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in…

> until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack SP2 was fantastic. For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

Yes. XP == SP2 :)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#227

Post by guraf » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:28 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #139

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they're not really meant to be used that way ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?

> ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels? With the page up and page down keys, mostly, though you could drag the scrollbar. Not sure about Word, but I believe many apps had a keyboard + mouse combination that enabled scrolling with any mouse movement without interacting with the scollbar, as well.

> With the page up and page down keys, mostly,

There is NO way that most people used page up down rather than drag the scrollbar in the late 90s.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#228

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:28 AM UTC

masswerk wrote: post #210

marcus_holmes wrote: post #146

Literally just ran into this problem 15 mins ago. Went to the HTTP RFC 9110 to check on the proper meaning of a HTTP response [0]. The list of sections on the right is scrollable, but there's no indication that it is, and no scroll bar unless you click on it and try to scroll it. The page as it loads on my screen looks like it stops at section 4.2.1. and there's no indication that there are more sections. Took me a f…

I defence of that web site, I do see a vertical scroll bar for this section. But I'm also one of those funny individuals who check that "Show scrollbars" is set to "always" in the system preferences, after each update. (On macOS, it's not the default, but it's still an option.)

true, this might be on me for not specifying that in Firefox

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#229

Post by jwrallie » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:29 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #180

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment. That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades,…

I believe the biggest obstacle is dealing with different toolkits, since gtk3 and later are constantly breaking theme compatibility with new versions, and nobody have the time to maintain good alternative themes in these conditions.

XFCE with Chicago95 already exists (and so does Q4OS with XPQ4) as proof of concept that the window manager and toolbar side can be replicated.

The problem is that important pieces of software are not relying on any toolkit directly, but implementing their own version, so even if you support qt, gtk2 and gtk3+ applications with 3 different themes, there will be software running under electron or implementing their own client side decorations and breaking all the rules.

I think the easiest way to start would be to simply collect and maintain existing themes with a unified look and make a distro based on Ubuntu LTS or even RHEL to avoid breaking changes at maximum. This distro would have pre-selected software that behaves well with the selected themes, and need to have at absolute minimum a working browser with extensions following that theme.

If implementing from the bottom up, then something similar to helloSystem could also be a way, but I do not see it working in practice due to the time it would take.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#230

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Oct 13, 2023, 3:29 AM UTC

My pet peeve is Azure Log Analytics. The query results window has a completely non-standard scrollbar setup, even compared to the rest of Azure.

The default result set shows 100% useless columns, all of which have the same constant values repeated for each row. E.g.: "subcription id", "location", etc...

The useful values are invariably off-to-the-right somewhere, so you have to scroll horizontally. Which you can. With a 2-pixel thick horizontal scrollbar that fades out and disappears permanently after about a second.

You have to be quick, otherwise you miss your chance to see your data.

It would be hilarious if it didn't cost me 50 cents each time I had to re-run a query so I can have another try at clicking the vanishing scrollbar before it's too late.