Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites • Hacker News Board

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#391

Post by xigoi » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:34 AM UTC

chuckadams wrote: post #98

lloydatkinson wrote: post #27

Ironic considering the entire page appears to be aligned to one quarter of the page on the left.

Centered for me at my usual browser width, then jumps to the left when widened to make room for the single side note example. A note that, boo hiss, doesn't show up at all at narrower widths. Not that it was an important note, but we're talking principle here. My mini-gripe is the typography: While I'm typically a dark mode guy, thin fonts are a lot harder to read in dark mode. But I've seen worse.

I fucking hate when websites straight up hide information on smaller screens.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#392

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 9:13 AM UTC

elric wrote: post #390

dredmorbius wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obvious solution is obvious: restore the fucking scrollbar. I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctl…

I have some 4k pixels of width on my desktop, and some 400 on mobile. It makes sense to not have a wide scrollbar on mobile. But it makes zero sense on desktop. Scrollbars do two things. They let you scroll (duh), but they are also progress indicators. There are other ways of scrolling (e.g. swiping on mobile) which work by default. But there is no other default way of showing progress. I don't particularly like the…

Agreeing strongly, but I'd just like to point out that a probably more significant problem on mobile is that a scrollbar which you're likely to unintentionally hit with your fingers as you're clumsily and very imprecisely interacting with your device, or as Steve Jobs so famously declared, are "holding it wrong", absolutely is a valid reason to deprecate classic indicator-and-control scrollbars on mobile devices.

That is, a classic desktop scrollbar, dating back to Xaw widgets, the original Apple desktop, and even earlier[1] not only shows where you are within a text or display, but allows you to control where you are typically by clicking on elements of that scrollbar: the cursor, the bar itself, and the endpoint arrows. Several of these had interesting / quirky / annoying variants on interaction (those familiar with early X11 Xaw widgets can likely think of several).

There's an interesting static image comparison at Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...>

And a much more informative interactive demonstration by Sébastien Matos from 2019:

https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/>

Discussed on HN a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307341>

And subject of quite a good review by The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20943552/scroll-bar-visua...>

Another point on swiping: my mobile device for the past three years has been an e-ink tablet. And I've learnt that swiping absolutely sucks. E-ink displays are much faster than people seem to believe, but there's still lag that an emissive display lacks, and it's far better to page through a long text or display than to scroll through it. I've all but entirely adopted an e-ink optimised browser that mostly does this, EinkBro (based on FOSS Browser), and I am constantly trying to page through other apps by tapping where EinkBro's forward/back touch zones are. People who've used other ebook readers will be familiar with the general concept as most have similar features. Having to imprecisely scroll through a document or app is exceedingly painful.

Scrollbars partially solve this problem as for most, tapping above or below the cursor will advance the display by about a page of text (some feature a few percent overlap). On desktop systems, there's an even better option: the space bar. For a whole slew of apps and tools, dating back to Unix's pg, more, less, most, etc., you can page through a long text one screen at a time by tapping the space bar, which is the largest damned key (and hence the easiest-to-hit target) on the keyboard (Fitts's Law[2]).

By contrast, scrolling on mobile:

- Is highly subject to the tap-vs-drag confusion: the GUI cannot consistently distinguish a tap action (interacting with the application) with a drag (changing the viewpoint).

- Is imprecise both by contact point (that is where you're interacting with the display) and displacement amount (how far you're moving through a text or app). You might scroll by more or less than a page, and it takes considerable time for the eye to recapture the reading point.

- Obscures what it is you're interacting with. Your finger is covering the display you're trying to manipulate. A desktop mouse cursor by contrast covers little or none of the text or app.

- Is subject to further confusion based on dynamic characteristics of the document or app you're dealing with (e.g., a Web page with progressively-loaded or rendered elements, or on Mozilla Pocket, inconsistent placement and textblock wrapping around image elements).

I come to desperately hate scroll-based interfaces these days.

________________________________

Notes:

1. I wanted to claim provenance to the Mother of All Demos in ninteen-and-motherfucking-sixty-eight, but can't definitively show that Englebart included scrollbars. Wikipedia does give a 1974 implementation in Bravo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrollbar#History_and_progress...>, citing http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/alto/Alto_Users...> (PDF).

2. Which dates to 1954!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law> See also https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fh0045689> (Fitts, 1964) and an extensive bibliography: https://www.yorku.ca/mack/RN-Fitts_bib.htm>.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#393

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 9:18 AM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #381

p_l wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... not exactly. It's possible to essentially reimplement the logic of how scrollbars look, where they are, and when they appear, in just CSS on modern browsers. Ended up having to do part of that once because it was easier at the time than to figure out just why a mismatched browser scrollbar would show up due to complex layouting issue (in embedded world, so we didn't actually have to worry about end user preferenc…

Yes, that’s true but I suspect that what you’re doing is also what people are complaining about ;-)

As much as I hate what browser devs have done to scrollbars, I tend to agree with you. The one thing worse that fucked defaults is everyone throwing their own fucked personal preferences at you. Which is why sane defaults matter so damned much.

There are browser configuration tweaks which can be done in at least some cases. On Firefox Mobile / Fennec, for example, there's a configuration hack which can be done.

I'm having trouble tracking that down but I think this might be it:

In about:config:

  ### scrollbar width
  widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override 30

  ### scrollbar shape
  widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style 4

From: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ujo1xy/how_to_incr...>

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#394

Post by hju22_-3 » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 10:34 AM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #357

jonahx wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the author notes this and offers an alternative: > One immediate thought is that this is completely superseded by the regular browser scroll bar that’s ever-present at the side of the page. However, the scroll bar could be deceiving. If your page has a comments section, the comments could make the page look dauntingly long. Similarly, references to other pages and general “footer material” count towards t…

That is a relevant point, although still it shouldn't be necessary; proper semantic HTML commands should allow the browser to handle it automatically (in the way subject to user preferences), e.g. the command can be used if you want to delimit the article from the comments, and with commands such as , , etc you can delimit sections and automatically make a table of contents.

That just sounds terrible. I want the program's scroll bar to reflect the actual size as accurately as possible. Anything else just sounds annoying.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#395

Post by funcDropShadow » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 12:07 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #384

dredmorbius wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obvious solution is obvious: restore the fucking scrollbar. I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctl…

I personally like disappearing (or shrinking) scrollbars, given they appear when I scroll with a wheel, or approach towards them. It allows me to understand where I am, allows me to grab and scroll quickly when I approach them, and they allow me to see more content. Yes, I use a big screen, but borderless and clean windows allows me to fit more content into the screen and is less distracting in general.

But this works only if you have a scroll wheel. And then it works only vertically. Horizontally you still have to click on the invisible scrollbar. To see where you are in relation to the whole document.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#396

Post by bayindirh » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 12:22 PM UTC

funcDropShadow wrote: post #395

bayindirh wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally like disappearing (or shrinking) scrollbars, given they appear when I scroll with a wheel, or approach towards them. It allows me to understand where I am, allows me to grab and scroll quickly when I approach them, and they allow me to see more content. Yes, I use a big screen, but borderless and clean windows allows me to fit more content into the screen and is less distracting in general.

But this works only if you have a scroll wheel. And then it works only vertically. Horizontally you still have to click on the invisible scrollbar. To see where you are in relation to the whole document.

In Firefox, when I start to move my mouse right, vertical scroll bar appears. Same is true for horizontal one when I move my mouse down. It happens even before I get closer to any of the scroll bars. So, a wheel/trackpad is not required per se.

Moreover, almost all mice I used except the most basic ones have horizontal scrolling capability.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#397

Post by rldjbpin » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 12:41 PM UTC

interesting take from an academic practitioner who also runs a blog.

i find it fascinating though in terms of how tech literate folks from outside this space is changing the way they consume written (web) content.

from the llm-chat paradigm shift, most people are less likely to read the source material, if this was not already the case thanks to tiktok and google search summarization. while i might feel that most people outside of hn were not reading personal blogs anyways, how many would truly appreciate these quality-of-life features.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#398

Post by account42 » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #236

gessha wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in and it makes me think the post is longer than it is. This leads me to either leave the post for later or straight up close it because it’s too long.

> To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in Or, especially in news sites, Taboola and other bottom feeder trash.

In those cases closing the page is the best solution anyway.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#399

Post by account42 » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

hju22_-3 wrote: post #394

zzo38computer wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a relevant point, although still it shouldn't be necessary; proper semantic HTML commands should allow the browser to handle it automatically (in the way subject to user preferences), e.g. the command can be used if you want to delimit the article from the comments, and with commands such as , , etc you can delimit sections and automatically make a table of contents.

That just sounds terrible. I want the program's scroll bar to reflect the actual size as accurately as possible. Anything else just sounds annoying.

The browser could use this information in various ways depending on the preferences of the user. One example is the scroll bar map mode implemented in various text editors where a scaled down version of the content is shown to help you see where you are. Similarly a browser could visualize the size and location of certain elements (e.g. and ) on the scroll bar. The key here is that it is the browser doing it so that you have a choice in wheter you want it or not on all websites.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#400

Post by account42 » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

ssahoo wrote: post #344

fanf2 wrote: post #167

Many of these suggestions are good. (I should make my subheds clickable!) But a couple of them, oh dear… I really hate progress bars, they are incredibly distracting. One of the worst examples of front end programmers wasting their time reimplementing browser functions badly. I already have scroll bars! I do not need more scroll bars! Also, link decoration: my browser already has a nice discreet indicator to tell me…

This may be controversial, but i the blame browsers for letting them hijack the scrollbar. it should not a feature.

Right, knowing the scroll position makes no sense for websites - it's yet another feature added for apps which should really have been declared out of scope of webbrowsers.