Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It • Hacker News Board

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#21

Post by gampleman » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

Dalewyn wrote: post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

I think this depends on what kind of content you are scrolling.

If you know how many items there are and all the items have the same height, then you can simply set the height of your container for the scrollbar to be accurate.

Furthermore you can listen to the scroll event and load the correct items if the user uses the scrollbar to jump to a particular spot.

So I think the bigger problem is a) people being lazy and not implementing this properly b) using this pattern where the preconditions don’t hold.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#22

Post by 9dev » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:05 PM UTC

RunSet wrote: post #17

mananaysiempre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, yes, I agree. On the other hand, it seems to me that this is partly the fault of the scrollbar as an idea. How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? I still remember an Android PDF viewer which would run through every page of a 2000-page document to get the page dimensions before displaying anything. (From wha…

> How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? Perhaps by not "instantly" displaying the document- that is, displaying it before you are able to display its scrollbar.

But why on earth would I want to wait for a document to open, just so the height of the scrollbar is accurate when I see it first..? That is such a minor detail when viewing a document.

Maybe the metaphor of the scrollbar is just a bad one?

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#23

Post by drosan » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#24

Post by csydas » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

Infinite scrolling isn't so much of an issue but I've noticed a few sites don't seem to handle feeding content into it well even when they undoubtedly have the content to back it. A few image sites I've checked seem to do this pretty poorly and reload previously loaded content repeatedly and it's annoying; I understand what is happening on the server side, but I'm shocked that this happens. Even Youtube does this and the video I just watched is in the suggested videos feed fairy high up on the list, which makes no sense to me.

It's also annoying to fill the scroll with unrelated content -- Twitter (as best as I can tell) seems to do this but I'm not sure how far it goes as Twitter spams login prompts after what I assume is the end of the main thread.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#25

Post by mhb » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:13 PM UTC

Zeno's scrollbar. So annoying.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#26

Post by d0gbread » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #6

Dalewyn wrote: post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

I have seen infinite scroll paradigms that simply load the next bit of content, causing the page to elongate, causing the bar to shrink and reposition. This is fine to me as the bar remains in exact sync with the document. I also think the scroll bar is an entirely desktop tool, and as infinite scrolling most benefits mobile, this is a moot point. Nobody on mobile uses the scroll bar. Personally, as a middle-click-an…

I use the scrollbar on mobile. It's a way to quickly navigate to a section of a particularly large document that would take tons of swiping. Not a frequent use case but an absolute necessity on occasion.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#27

Post by daptaq » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

sodapopcan wrote: post #19

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #12

Infinite scrolling makes the contents of the page unlinkable, breaks searchability and caching. It always makes the experience worse for unclear benefits. What's the problem it solves? Not resending the header and the footer on changing pages? Really?

Pagination also makes things unlinkable, though. Not that I’m not necessarily defending infinite scrolling, but it’s a tough problem.

Not necessarily, if the URL has some absolute position like the ID of the first item instead of the relative number of pages between the newest item and the current page. I believe that Reddit does something like that (of course, only if you sort by new).

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#28

Post by d0gbread » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

Aerroon wrote: post #13

Don't. I have yet to use a service where I prefer having infinite scroll. I always prefer having pages.

Do.

I have sometimes used services where I prefer having infinite scroll. I sometimes prefer it.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#29

Post by plugin-baby » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #22

RunSet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? Perhaps by not "instantly" displaying the document- that is, displaying it before you are able to display its scrollbar.

But why on earth would I want to wait for a document to open, just so the height of the scrollbar is accurate when I see it first..? That is such a minor detail when viewing a document. Maybe the metaphor of the scrollbar is just a bad one?

Or just imperfect, but often useful?

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#30

Post by mananaysiempre » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

RunSet wrote: post #17

mananaysiempre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, yes, I agree. On the other hand, it seems to me that this is partly the fault of the scrollbar as an idea. How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? I still remember an Android PDF viewer which would run through every page of a 2000-page document to get the page dimensions before displaying anything. (From wha…

> How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? Perhaps by not "instantly" displaying the document- that is, displaying it before you are able to display its scrollbar.

That seems silly as well, doesn’t it? Why should I wait for all the 1030 pages and 155 MB of Matter and Interactions[1] or 1442 pages and 126 MB of Life[2] to load before I can do anything with it? (Not that a hundred meg should take that much time to load, but then you realize PDF is the moral equivalent of a bunch of gzipped JSON files pointing to each other...) It would be handy if PDFs included an index of all page sizes in a single place, but they don’t, so we need to make do with what they do include somehow.

[1] https://matterandinteractions.org/

[2] https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Life-Th...