David Pogue Calls Out 18 Sites For Failing His Space-Bar Scrolling Test (yahoo.com) 309
An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Finance's David Pogue:
You know this tip, don't you? When you tap the Space bar, the web page you're reading scrolls up exactly one screenful... But in recent years, something clumsy and unfortunate has happened: Web designers have begun slapping toolbars or navigation bars at the top of the page. That's fine -- except when it throws off the Space-bar scrolling! Which, most of the time, it does.
Suddenly, tapping Space doesn't scroll the right amount. The lines you were supposed to read next scroll too high; they're now cut off. Now you have to use your mouse or keyboard to scroll back down again. Which defeats the entire purpose of the Space-bar tip. Over the last few months, I've begun keeping track of which sites do Space-bar scrolling right -- and which are broken. I want to draw the public's attention to this bit of broken code, and maybe inspire the world's webmasters to get with the program.
Pogue's article announces "the world's first Space-Bar Scrolling Report Card," shaming sites like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Yorker, and Scientific American for their improperly-scrolling web sites. (As well as, ironically, Yahoo -- the parent company of the site Pogue is writing for.) Pogue writes that web programmers "should get their act together so that the scroll works as it's supposed to. (And if you work for one of those sites, and you manage to get the scrolling-bug fixed, email me so I can update this article and congratulate you.)"
Suddenly, tapping Space doesn't scroll the right amount. The lines you were supposed to read next scroll too high; they're now cut off. Now you have to use your mouse or keyboard to scroll back down again. Which defeats the entire purpose of the Space-bar tip. Over the last few months, I've begun keeping track of which sites do Space-bar scrolling right -- and which are broken. I want to draw the public's attention to this bit of broken code, and maybe inspire the world's webmasters to get with the program.
Pogue's article announces "the world's first Space-Bar Scrolling Report Card," shaming sites like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Yorker, and Scientific American for their improperly-scrolling web sites. (As well as, ironically, Yahoo -- the parent company of the site Pogue is writing for.) Pogue writes that web programmers "should get their act together so that the scroll works as it's supposed to. (And if you work for one of those sites, and you manage to get the scrolling-bug fixed, email me so I can update this article and congratulate you.)"
Space-bar? (Score:2, Interesting)
Never realized that key performs scrolling.
Why don't people use the Page-up/-down keys anymore?
Re:Space-bar? (Score:5, Funny)
Never realized that key performs scrolling.
Why don't people use the Page-up/-down keys anymore?
It's almost as if you've never seen an Apple keyboard.
Re: (Score:2)
The space bar is better than the page-down key because the space bar is big and easy to find without looking, even if you've removed your hands from the keyboard.
Page-up is a different question; you could in principle use shift-space or s.t., but I don't know of any browser that does that. Fortunately the need for scrolling the view back up is rarer than the need for scrolling the view down, apart from these badly designed websites.
Re: (Score:3)
Shift+space acts as a page-up in Chrome and Firefox, at least.
Re: (Score:2)
omygosh, I thought I had tried that--thanks for pointing it out!
Re: (Score:2)
They have, but they are only accessible using the Fn key.
Unless you use Alt-Cursor up/down or an external keyboard with numeric keypad...
Re: (Score:2)
Full-size Apple keyboards still have Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/ForwardDel keys. (Fn is also in that block, but it's a key I never use.)
Re: (Score:2)
I should probably file this under "Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to", but what purpose does having a filename beginning with a space serve? That would be really, really annoying in any unix-like environment. Or for that matter, in DOS.
Re: (Score:3)
> but what purpose does having a filename beginning with a space serve?
Forced Sorting.
It is MY filenames, not the OS's filenames. That is why we have filenames in the first place -- to be human accessible.
This is why CP/M was designed by an idiot, which MS copied. You can't use colons (:), or double quote (") in a filename.
* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)
Re: (Score:2)
Why use the space, though? Just about any special character will sort before "a". How about an underscore "_" or the hash "#"? These characters work cross-platform and in most shells. I'd stay away from "$" and "%" because these have special meanings on unix and Windows, respectively. I'd stay away from "~" because that does a lookup on user. Any sort of a slash is bad news. But spaces and commas are some of the most common delimiters, so that seems like a really bad choice IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure they do sort properly in shells. But GUI file manglers often try to second guess you. Nautilus (which really ought to know better) ignores a leading underskid & ignores case to boot.
Re: (Score:3)
It comes down to your task at hand. I (usually) prefer the Mac "natural sort", where it tries to get all fancy and put "a_10" after "a_9" instead of after "a_1". I almost never want "A" to follow "z". But then sometimes I'm dealing with a big machine-generated data set and the natural sort gets it badly wrong.
My pet peeve is that Windows does not offer a sort which includes the folders mixed in and that Mac does not offer a sort with the folders segregated :)
Re: (Score:2)
The solution to that is to name your files properly, once and for all, at source. Because plenty of stuff (my current TV, most walkmen/mans(?) I've owned) just do dumb asciibetical sort.
Really, it should be switchable, like ls. Your way is -v, if you didn't already know. It's useful - when you want it.
Aside: I had some files which I'd numbered with Roman prefixes because $reasons, and I swear it sorted them "correctly" but
Re: (Score:2)
Muggles would never begin a filename with anything other than a letter. Even numbers make them nervous.
Anyone beginning a name with a special character is doing it for a special reason.
tl;dr: You're full of shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Command lines handle filenames with spaces just fine. But the auto-completion stuff can't possibly know the difference between a delimiter and the beginning of a filename if you actually start the filename with a space, which is an interesting enough edge case that I was wondering what on Earth he was doing.
Re: (Score:2)
Is this one of the devs that pays you for the privilege of working on your shitty POS app that nobody's heard of?
so who originated this venerable function, anyway? (Score:2)
I remember this action on a CDC Cyber editor, and on a DEC VMS editor back in the early 80s. but where did this useful function really come from ?
Re: (Score:3)
Page-up/page-down are subject to the same problem. I know not everyone scrolls in this manner, but if you do (as I do) it's extremely annoying on the type of site mentioned in TFS.
But it's a symptom of a larger problem, alluded to in the "list of historical problems" post above. Web designers care about pushing their products and their adverts and little else. If the site isn't especially usable or even downright annoying, they could care less. And people keep coming back to such sites, which in the designe
Re: (Score:2)
Oops ... television, not radio :(
aka PgDn "trick" (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't call it a "tip" or "trick" if the meaning of the key is obvious. Of course, kids these days might not see an actual PgDn key any more, and there are probably other reasons for the (unix)? tradition of using space for the same action, like HJKL for arrow keys.
Speaking of tradition, if browsers can respect the traditional space key, how about basic text manipulations like Ctrl-K, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For decades (since Win 3.1, I think), I've used a keyboard re-mapper in Windows that allows this kind of re-mapping. In my case, ctrl-h is the left cursor arrow, ctrl-a takes you to the beginning of the line, etc.--modeled after vi's keys, but ctrl keys rather than moded keys--so you never have to remove your fingers from the alphabetic part of the keyboard. If you're a touch typist, it's ideal. (It does have two modes, however: if you type ctrl-q, then all the cursor movement keys do selection.) This w
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's a fairly non-trivial problem. The old pricey way to solve it was to use an OS (or at least word processor) that rendered to the screen using Display Postscript and then also use a Postscript printer. The modern Macs and printers do a decent enough job by using something akin to PDF for display and raster printing. I assume the Adobe apps do something similar on Windows, but Word certainly does not and so you get different results in print than you do on the screen. What program do you use on Windows
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the basic problem with Word is far simpler, and deeply, deeply stupid: Word doesn't set absolute margin sizes, instead it relies on the printer driver to tell Word the size of the page, then calculates the size remaining for text relative to that.
It's one of the more ridiculous and stupid design decisions ever made. Rounding errors in page sizes as reported from different printers cause the lines to wrap differently depending on your default printer. And since you can't even view a document with
Re: (Score:2)
They're what Mac users use because in the interest of ease-of-use, they have no home or end keys, but have two-extra modifier keys (Fn and Cmd). Ctrl-a => home (Windows), Ctrl-e => end, Ctrl-k => shift-end, delete.
Cmd-a => Ctrl-a.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 [apple.com]
I think some of these keys derive from ancient Unix days. Jobs being reluctant to even put arrow keys on the Mac. They are basic and have been around forever, but only if you're a Mac user or ancient Unix guy.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
They are bash shortcuts. https://www.ice2o.com/bash_qui... [ice2o.com]
And no, they are only worth knowing if you find yourself stuck without gui editors, as no one in their right mind gives a fuck about raw bash text manipulation.
Actually, lots of people are starting to care to a much larger degree. The tools they are complaining about in TFA are used for keyboard navigation, screen readers, reader enhancers, etc. for disability ADA compliance. Non ADA compliance is going to be 2017's big boogyman issue to fix on the web.
The static toolbar at the top is one of the ways you can solve the "skip navigation" requirement for keyboard tabbing navigation and "No CSS" functionality. Put the div at the bottom of the code, and position it
Perhaps (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps he should check sites for whether, when you follow a link and return, it takes you back to where you were or to the top of the page.
Not the real problem - Toolbars are! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the fact that some of the text gets obscured by a toolbar isn't the problem.
The real issue IS all the toolbars that remain in place when you are scrolling.
Who ever thought it was a good idea to steal my vertical pixels should be shot at dawn.
Even with Full HD screen there is still LESS vertical pixels than what I had 15 years ago on an old 21" 1600x1200 CRT.
"Progress" my as.
Seriously, could someone in web design please explain WHY keeping a toolbar on the top is a good idea?
Re:Not the real problem - Toolbars are! (Score:5, Interesting)
> Seriously, could someone in web design please explain WHY keeping a toolbar on the top is a good idea?
Graphics Guru here. (I've been programming graphics and doing UI design since the mid 80's)
I used one for the first time on one of my web pages a few months ago where I show the Section name, Page Number, and other misc info -- some which is clickable to navigate to a different section. Basically a "sticky floating header." I also have an option where the viewer can toggle color on/off (since I use color highlighting to show categories.)
I have mixed opinions about this:
* (+) It looks sexy as hell so I can understand why people want to use it. As you scroll the page up the last section you come across "sticks" to the top of the screen until the next one. It helps "anchor" the reader by showing them useful information relevant for the current section.
* (-) Calculating where to scroll now needs to be intercepted / adjusted to account for the sticky header height.
* (+/-) If used the ancient iFrame that would solve the scrolling calculation problem but I lose the graceful "scroll up into fixed place".
* (-) I hate the fact that I'm losing vertical space which is already at a premium.
* (-) Treating it as a "sticky footer" solves the scrolling calculation problem, but it just looks weird as the reader is mis-led into believing what the "next" section is, not the "current" section.
* (-) I really wish there was an option to auto-hide it -- but that has it own's problems. What triggers it? That forces the reader to press a key or move their mouse to make it visible. UGH.
With all the problems it creates I'm not convinced the sticky header is the right solution -- it has a limited usefulness. It definitely should be used sparingly, but I lament that there really are no good alternatives.
i.e. Form without Function is useless visual vomit.
Unfortunately too may UI / UX "experts" get dazzled by the "bling" forgetting WHY people are reading in the first place. i.e. They want to solve a task: either linear reading, or non-linear navigation.
This is why I constantly asked myself 4 questions when I was deploying it:
* What purpose does this sticky header server?
* What problem does it solve?
* Does it create more problems then it solves?
* What are the alternatives?
Good design is almost always a trade off. :-/
The problem modern Web designers don't know what the fuck they are doing anymore. They don't understand the _context_ of the problem that has been "solved" for 20 years. Instead they want to dumb their UI down to tablet / phone standards tossing out all the UI advantages that people have come to expect as standard behavior. UI has become a "lowest common denominator" -- the worst of everything. Even worse these UX designers think they are doing god's work unwilling to listen to feedback on all the dumb shit they are doing, unable to learn.
This current fad of "flat design" is one such idiocracy. Instead of empower the view to use different colors to help distinguish icons you force them to decode similar monochromatic silhouettes. *face palm*.
It is good someone is starting to call out these dumb web designers.
Re: (Score:2)
Ha ha, did you not get the memo saying that all devices were to be used to watch advertising video in the standard wide screen format. Moron you have no idea how to give your money to big corporations.
Re: (Score:2)
"Who ever thought it was a good idea to steal my vertical pixels should be shot at dawn." I don't understand, why wait?
Re: (Score:2)
I have a Greasemonkey script that works wonders in this situation. Any site with annoying toolbars gets added to the list in the script and "position:fixed" is gone!
How about the Back button? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The author of that page is wrong as fuck.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet it still breaks the back button, because people DO expect only an overlay that suddenly popped up after the page was rendered to disappear when they click the back button, not the whole damn page.
Mind you, any site that pops up an overlay that blocks what I'm trying to read with something like "give us your email address to receive blah blah blah", I'm quite happy to leave anyway. I'd label such cases as BROKEN_DO_NOT_FIX.
Re: (Score:2)
The short version: users expect the back button to take them back to what they perceived to be their previous page. The notion of perception is the key factor here, since there’s often a difference between what is technically a new page and what users perceive to be a new page – which can create discrepancies between where the user expects the back button to take them and where it actually takes them.
People expect Back to take them back. Anything else is broken. If the framework you use has implemented it wrong, your framework is broken.
Fucking mobile keeps ruining everything (Score:5, Informative)
Huge fonts, toolbars, mystery hamburger navigation and goddamn parallax scrolling.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, why can't we separate mobile and desktop viewers? I was OK with this! Argh.
Re: (Score:3)
Say you have a 12" tablet and a 10" laptop. Which is the "desktop computer" and which the "mobile device"?
You appear to recommend the use of a separate m.-site. If a phone user shares a link through e-mail, Usenet, or more recent web-based substitutes for the above (forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) with a desktop user, which version should the recipient see?
Re: (Score:3)
How about this; give the user an easy-to-use function that forces the page to load the mobile or desktop version on a site-by-site basis.
Good luck designing such "an easy-to use function", especially when such a large percentage of the population can't perform even the simplest tasks on a computer [nngroup.com].
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
It's part of the Web 3.0 trend (Score:2)
.
- low contrast text. The lower the contrast the better. The goal is text that is all but unreadable for a pair of 20-year-old eyeballs.
- expected functionality of the webpage UI is sabotaged. Make sure that "space bar to scroll down a page" continues to work, but works incorrectly
- lots of meanin
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
- low contrast text. The lower the contrast the better. The goal is text that is all but unreadable for a pair of 20-year-old eyeballs.
^^^^ THIS.
Also include:
- weirdo color schemes like soft-pink text on a gray background, yellow on gray, pink on white, etc etc
- super-tiny font size,
- page elements that zoom in and out, bounce, or elastically jitter or shake for no reason,
- form elements that are basically invisible until you click into them (i.e. no outlines so you can't tell that they're for elements)
- custom JS-rendered form elements that don't work in some browsers or mobile devices and/or can't be accessed using the keyboard
- numbnut
Fuck Yahoo (Score:2)
Also, arrow keys that don't move the page (Score:2)
The article mentions scrolling up/down small abounts with the keyboard, presumably by using arrow keys. They are also handy for browsing pages wider than the browser window. Alas, many sites break the sideways logic -- when pressing left or right, they send you to the prev/next section of the site. For example, next topic on a discussion forum.
I wonder who actually uses such a "feature" -- surely the kids today don't even use a keyboard, that relic from the 1960s terminal world.
Re: (Score:2)
I usually have a 1920 wide screen divided equally into two browser windows. That allows me to organize my tabs into multiple windows by task or web site instead of having them all run into each other.
With that layout, most web sites do fit inside each window. However, there has unfortunately been a convention to design web sites for 1024 pixels width... which is slightly above 1920/2. That means that on some sites, I would have to scroll just a little bit left or right to make certain elements visible.
Anything that breaks scrolling (Score:2)
There's been a trend since the last few years making websites scroll via javascript, which completely takes over the user settings. I always turn off the annoying "smooth scrolling" feature, but since those damn scripts take over the browser built-in scrolling, I'm forced to see their so-called "smooth scrolling" which is slower than the built-in one and is overtaxing my old CPU/GPU. The end result is a forced choppy scrolling that looks like crap and make me hate your brand/company.
The second annoying tren
clicking the scroll bar (Score:2)
And while we're at it (Score:4, Insightful)
And while we're at it, can we name and shame the fucktards who implement the "infinitely scrolling" page feature?
I hate that shit- you can't bookmark the page properly, and if you back up to it then it either loses it's memory of where you were (forcing you to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll down to where you were) OR it forces you to reload 150 pages of crap back to get back to where you were. Either way its a pain in the ass and a hostile UI design.
Oh noes (Score:2)
Many of the websites work just fine. (Score:2)
I'm wondering if the guy who wrote the article has a dodgy plugin or browser that doesn't work correctly. I took a random selection of his websites and not a single word was obscured on any of the following:
- The Wall Street Journal
- The New Yorker
- Tumblr
- FiveThirtyEight
- Kickstarter
I'll leave it to someone else to check the rest but frankly this article has been the biggest waste of my time today ... and I spent 4 hours in a car today.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Works perfectly for me.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm using an ad blocker and it works fine.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of web developers broke basic form functionality by writing their own submit handlers. These often deviate from accepted practices such as Enter for submit. You only have to lose form data once or twice before saying "fuck it" and always clicking the submit "button" (often just an image with an onClick hander) on all forms.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that's true. I seem to remember Mosaic doing it waaaay back when.
Re:Didn't you know? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think the key is called "Enter" to begin with? Think about it. It was the key that entered (submitted) form data. That's what the key meant for 30+ years before the PC (let alone the mouse) was invented. "Return" was a different key entirely, one that took the same action as a carriage return on a typewriter (and sometimes labeled with the down-and-right arrow).
The real mistake was combining the functions of these two, distinct keys in the early PC days - at the time, terminal keyboards still did it right. Then a bunch of kids re-invented form submission, ignoring decades of best practices in usability.
Enter for form submission was the standard and the correct standard since before you were born. That's what the name of the key means ffs. Now get off my lawn!
Re: (Score:2)
Early PCs did not have both an Enter and a Return key
When did I say "early PCs"? PCs have only been around since the late 70s. Computing and human interfaces were around for decades before personal computers. Do you know what a terminal is?
You know that home computers only became popular (beyond a tiny geek hobby) about halfway through the history of general-purpose computers, right? And that getting and posting forms was the norm for user interaction from almost the beginning?
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, that's great.
In case anyone else is wondering, that add on is compatible with Pale Moon, and it encrypts the form content that it saves. So far seems rather nice.
Re: (Score:3)
Even the original design of Windows was supposed to have keyboard shortcuts as the main way to interact with the environment and individual programs, with the mouse functions translated, depending on context, to the appropriate keyboard shortcuts in the main event loop.
Using the mouse to access menu functions, you'd see the keyboard shortcuts beside the desired operation (Print Ctl-P, Save-Ctl-S, etc) and quickly increase your speed. F*cking web developers screwed that paradigm up real good. Windows also
Re:Didn't you know? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can no longer discover the keyboard shortcuts in Windows. Discoverability is the victim in the latest user-hostile UI fads.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm calling bullshits on your entire comment until you provide a citation for "Jarring UI experience."
Re:As a developer. (Score:5, Informative)
"Jarring UI experience"?
Seriously? When I ask for the next page, it is because I WANT TO READ THE NEXT PAGE, and not because I want to see how clever the scrolling animation is.
Also, key scrolling is a local browser function. Whether it is space or page down or META+wheel on the mouse or shaking your phone in just the right way, the browser is just jumping down the buffer a bit.
The problem is that the HTML specs provide a way to float crap on top, and ways to pin it to the top or bottom of the page, and also a hint to the browser that indicates how much reading space is covered by the crap, so that the browser knows how far to jump per page request. Lots of websites have the floaty crap, without the hint.
That's all that needs to happen. Web designers need to provide the height of the crap they are cluttering the page with, and they aren't. They aren't being asked to write special javascript to jump properly, they aren't being asked to write keyboard drivers, or layout engines. Just to include a hint about how much of the reading space their floaty crap is obscuring.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that the HTML specs provide a way to float crap on top, and ways to pin it to the top or bottom of the page, and also a hint to the browser that indicates how much reading space is covered by the crap, so that the browser knows how far to jump per page request. Lots of websites have the floaty crap, without the hint.
I found a solution this weekend: just disable CSS. Pages are readable again, besides the catastrophic breakdown of design, but articles... man, articles are text and images again. And space/PgDown scrollable.
Re: (Score:2)
Same here, I'm not familiar with the hint.
Re: (Score:2)
Web and HTML isn't the same beast it was 20+ years ago. It is considered more of a thin-client interface protocol then a document reader.
No, it was considered a document reader, period. How it rendered the documents was entirely up to the client, but only basic content such as text and (some) images were supported - very poorly. It was for reading documents, including plaintext. The servers would serve up documents, in either plaintext or html. HTML was a type of document, not a protocol. The protocol was http: or file: for local files (which never required the "web"), HTML was a document standard, not protocol.
On a side note, the standard
Re: (Score:2)
1. When all browsers do it, and it's not a standard, should you ignore it? I would say no. From a developer's perspective, you should reasonably try to support these things. This could also potentially be an accessibility issue... if the browser sees a page of content as different than how your web page sees it, I suppose there could be some sort of issue there.
2. OK, but the space bar scroll hasn't changed in that time.
3. You can scroll by page with the mouse by clicking on the scrollbar track. It's not ju
Re: (Score:2)
4. The Page down is a Jarring UI experience.
Surely, you must joking here. PgUp/PgDn are useful buttons and they ought to work right.
Re: (Score:2)
The keyboard is not a widely used technology for navigation. Most people use the pointer device and most have a scroll wheel or some equivalent scrolling gesture to them.
It's essential for web applications the same people will be depending on every day to get their jobs done. I never design systems without keyboard navigation.
Trying to make sure your web site/web application supports all those crazy keystrokes they did doesn't make much sense. And would require much more effort than to appease some old guys habits.
The only metric I care about is productivity. "Doesn't make much sense" and "appease some old guys habits" convey no objectively useful information.
I can get to any screen I want from anywhere instantly without looking at the screen and without navigation aids even being visible. This provides ability to navigate faster and improve my productivity v
Re: (Score:2)
Some say it is being lazy others saying you are meeting your deadline.
Real world development you don't have time to make it perfect.
Re: (Score:2)
The scourges of the WWW, in chronological order (Score:4, Interesting)
There is necessarily some overlap to these plagues
1) AOL (1990's Internet gateway confused with the actual Internet)
2) hotmail/msn
3) spam/malware
4) Penguinistas (from the advent of Linux until Linux became a stable and mature OS, c. 2004/6; subsequently, for the most part, it's all good, ignoring the systemd pimple)
4) Adobe Flash
5) poorly implemented Javascript (still continues, never ends)
6) Apple and the development and ubiquity of the iOS-dominated mobile web (this ruined nearly everything for mobile device power-users)
7) unrestrained web developers and site feature creep, KISS is replaced with incomprehensible complexity (slow steady march to WWW apocalypse)
WWW/Internet never needed any of these things. Some of them started out innocuously enough, and turned evil (like Flash), and some started out evil and turned to goodness (such as Linux and it's irrational popularity prior to become mature and stable).
What will be the next scourge of the Internet?
Re: (Score:3)
8) Hidden menus and mystery meat.
Google Maps is the prototype example. In the first or second iterations some years ago, Google Maps was very nice. Menus and functions used to be obvious and intuitive. They've hidden more and more things behind cryptic icons or that only show up on mouseover. I'm sure I could read up on it and figure it all out, but I use it so rarely that it's not worth my effort. Alternatives such as Mapquest are easier to use, and for occasional things like printing directions the
Speaking of chronological order (Score:2)
But "navigation bars or toolbars at the top of the web page" do not fall into the category of WWW scourges.
That's been a standard web page design since about, I don't know, 1993.
And making the toolbar stay there while the rest of the content scrolls has been there since the invention of frames (1994?) and CSS (1996).
So whoever invented the clever space bar thing (probably sometime after those dates), should have taken all of those common page designs into account when implementing the scroll control feature
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Except for all the 'made for Internet Explorer' pages which abused ActiveX to the detriment of Netscape.
Re: (Score:3)
...Microsoft's browser monopoly shenanigans are technically not something that affected anyone other than Microsoft users that didn't have the ability to work around it....
Au contraire... It appeared that Microsoft's goal was to leverage its Windows monopoly in an attempt to push the web "standards" towards its Internet Explorer capabilities. Microsoft wanted the web to work best when viewed via Internet Explorer, and in the process, take control of the web in the same manner in which they took control of the desktop.
.
Microsoft wanted the web client to drive the web standards development, instead of the standards driving the web client development. Fortunately, Microsoft
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you don't know who David Pogue is, you have no business criticizing anything related to usability. Just keep on making your crappy interfaces and collect your check.
Re: (Score:2)
Does he not know that space makes the screen scroll DOWN, not up?
Re:Let's get them good (Score:5, Funny)
It makes the view move down causing the contents or page to scroll up. In no cases should it cause the screen to move unless your device is on unstable surface.
Re: (Score:2)
I must admit I didn't know what a pogue was, so I googled, and got a definition equating to REMF
(Rear Echelon Moother-F***er)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is infinite scrolling where you think you're approaching the bottom of a page and then more page gets added? Yes, I can't stand it. And I also find inserting text after rendering to be annoying.
Re: (Score:2)
Is being called out by David Pogue going to shame anyone?
Only if enough of us express our discontent. And maybe email the culprits a few links, such as to this discussion and the original article.
Re: (Score:2)
Back in ~1995, any major application that failed to provide a PgDn mechanism would be the laughing stock everywhere.
It's technically optional to have the Spacebar do this, but the feature itself is never optional.
Something which isn't required for mobile devices because the user can trivially finger scroll that works as page down: Put the finger at the bottom
Re: (Score:2)
There is actually a touch-screen gesture that should be equivalent to a single press on the Page Down key: a short flick of the finger. Android actually does this wrong as it scrolls different distances depending on subtle variations of your finger speed.
There are also tablets whose primary function is an e-reader where there also physical buttons specifically for moving to the next/previous page.
Re: (Score:2)
Back in ~1995, any major application that failed to provide a PgDn mechanism would be the laughing stock everywhere.
It's technically optional to have the Spacebar do this, but the feature itself is never optional.
Anyone plugging in a modem to dial-up to the internet today would be the laughing stock everywhere. In other words, it's not 1995 anymore, and based on the number of people who even know this feature exists I'd say it's pretty optional, and likely irrelevant.
Something which isn't required for mobile devices because the user can trivially finger scroll that works as page down: Put the finger at the bottom of the screen, then move the finger to the top.
My point was more centered around the fact that mobile is becoming the dominant interface to the internet, which is all the more reason this outdated feature is irrelevant, much like the dial-up modem.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed.
A partial workaround on YouTube is to use K to toggle the play/pause state. The problem is the video doesn't also have auto focus.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it worse when I have been browsing through comments below a video, I press Home to get to the top of the page and the video goes back to its friggin start position.
I then have to click around on the timeline to find the position where I was playing the video.
There was no visual indication on the web page whether it was the browser window or the video player that had focus - and the video is often outside the viewport, so why should it be able to have focus anyway?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, that comment was a blast from the past.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, N900 is ancient but there's still no upgrade. Neo900 is expensive almost-same-spec vapourware (it gets you 512MB instead of 256MB memory, slightly better CPU and that's it, for $750 when you can get an used N900 for $25), Pyra [pyra-handheld.com] is ridiculously thick vapourware (new phones are way too thin, Pyra goes the other extreme), Minotaur One [crowdsupply.com] looks more reasonable than Pyra but is even more vaporous. Both of these don't pretend to be phones, I think N900's thickness is about the sweet spot.
Nokia's default keyma
Re: (Score:3)
Besides, we already have the page down key.
No we don't.
They both have the same broken behavior. You missed the forest for the trees.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm old enough to remember when "buttery smooth" scrolling seemed to be of vital importance on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
What people should be pissed about is the continuing use a mysql/php/apache in the face of mongodb/javascript/nodejs.
The only tool you own is a hammer, isn't it...
Re: (Score:2)
Y'know, that analogy just kinda falls apart all over the place if you're trying to promote node/mongo with it.
LAMP has been around a lot longer than nodejs and mongo. Everyone has it, and there's a reason why a lot of people still use it (hint: it isn't because they don't want to learn something new). And the tools around node for build and deployment are an egregiously overcomplicated mess. Mongo has its own pain points. And yes, I happen to use both, along with various LAMP-based applications. And s