Fractal Lab

We reimplement Scroll because browsers like FireFox don't let you apply CSS for scroll bars, forcing you to have the OS's scrollbar branding (colors, style, etc..) in the middle of your page's branding.

The last thing you want to do with your brand is to have someone else take it over.

The whispering should be made clearer.

Nothing in the DOM spec indicates that there are scroll bars or anything else about how the user is interacting with the scrolling position of the page. The window.scroll* functions talk about pixel or line dimensions, and not how the user's scrolling interface works or how the user interacts with that interface.

For example, some common methods are:

    * scrolling with a mouse by clicking on a traditional scrollbar
      (this is what is being reimplemented)
    * using a scroll wheel or trackpad drag
      (compatibility is *often* added for this, but not always)
    * dragging touchscreen    (support varies, getting better)
    * using the arrow keys    (sometimes supported)

..and a few of that almost always break when scrolling isn't left to the user agent:

    * PageUp/PageDn
    * some other key to page down, such as the space bar
    * a browser extension to auto-scroll the page slowly
    * accessibility tools of various types
    * no javascript support
    * the foot pedal I made out of MIDI keyboard sustain pedals and an
      old USB keyboard that is mapped to a non-standard X KeySym and
      bound as an alias to PageDn in firefox (it's Meta in emacs)
    * the scrolling UI for next year's Cool New Gadget that we cannot
      support because the device doesn't exist yet, but the manufacturers
      of the device can add support for standard HTML/DOM features

Also, even in the case where the UI method is guess correctly, the details may be different. For example, I set firefox's mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y to 500 so each scroll wheel click is a much larger movement of the page, because my mouse wheel is not a mouse wheel - I use thumb buttons for scrolling because the normal wheel was causing RSI problems.

The basic problem is a common misconception about what HTML, where the client (via their User Agent) controls the presentation. As they are in the hands of the users, there will always be a lot of variation as those users tailor their tools to their personal needs. The only way to maintain any particular presentation feature across all clients is to turn the WWW back into TV. The alternative is learning what can be specified by the page (pixel scroll position) and what is NOT in the spec (how the user and their User Agent interact), while remembering that any of these features may not be implemented the way you think they are.

Personally I find that I have to go to myself in these matters. So, a thing has value in itself if I find it valuable just as it is. Not in the sense "I want to own it", neither the sense of "I want to extract something other out of it", nor what you are alluding to, that it's useful for making something else.

So if I say "this is valuable", then nobody can remove that value by saying "no it's not", that just means, "I don't see value in it".

But none of this has anything to do with what eigenvalue said. With the subjective, immediate way of reasoning I am proposing, the way of spotting commercial value is saying "I want to pay money for this", which I also understand as your standpoint. But that's not what eigenvalue was saying, or rather that's not how I read it. To me it felt more like "I think this could be smartly packaged in a way that would make some other people pay money to somebody else", which I don't particularly like. Hence my reaction.

But again, mostly the wordplay which I found irresistible. :)

Incredible.

In the 90s we had rendering software that took about 10 minutes to general a single 2D fractal. I loved playing with it.

When I went to university, as part of a course, we watched a video where someone had created animations by adjusting a single parameter of the (2D) fractal over time. They'd spent untold hours of processing time to generate the frames. It was magical because it helped to offer insights into how the parameters are tied to the shape of the structure. I seem to recall fractals that looked like they were slapping each other's hands.

This is the first time I've really seen fractal software in the last 10-15 years. At university we talked about how it would exist one day, but damn, that's just incredible to see.